[marketliberal] The Patent Value Tax
Like all brilliant ideas, this one is infuriatingly obvious in hindsight -- a straightforward application of a hardcore bid-em-off-the-land version of the land value tax. Some quick web searching reveals no prior art; did you make this up just now? I would consider modifyng the bid-em-off-the-property provision in the same way that I would modify it for land (and maybe orbits but not spectrum). People who can't pay their tax can let it accumulate (with interest) as a lien against the eventual sale or transfer of the property, and the lien is capped at the market value of the property. However, market value of patents is harder to assess, and the escalating patent value tax rate would create an incentive to just let the tax accumulate and then abandon the patent when the rate is too high for anyone to want to bid for it. So I might worry that an undercapitalized inventor will not be able to defend a patent if he and a predatory bidder understand its value more than the market does (or else the inventor could get a loan from the understanding market). However again, I'm confident that markets are good enough at valuing patents that this wouldn't be a big problem. So I don't yet see any problem with this idea. It could be applied to copyrights too, to the extent that one even believes in copyright. Dan Sullivan wrote at dfc_talk: Enter the patent value tax. The holder of a patent would be required to self-assess its value, with the stipulation that anyone could purchase the patent at that value. The purchaser would have to honor contracts into which the previous patent holder had entered, to the extent that he could not increase the royalty charge or impose other restrictions. The contracts themselves would have to be public contracts. That is, if one producer is allowed to apply a patented invention to a particular type of product at a particular royalty rate, then all producers would be allowed to produce the same product at the same royalty rate. For the first year a patent is granted, the tax rate could well be zero. It would then gradually increase until, at the year of expiration, it consumes nearly the entire amount of the patent's self-assessed value. Naturally, the value of the patent would decrease as the tax rate increases and the expiration date approaches.
[marketliberal] Libertarian Party video mash-ups
Here are nine new video shorts promoting the LP and libertarianism: http://libertarianmajority.net/videos
[marketliberal] Vote Smart Cheat Sheet
Here are the answers I'm submitting today to the Project Vote Smart http://votesmart.org Political Courage test. Taxpayers should not be forced to pay for other people's abortions, nor should any government or individual force a woman to have an abortion. Most Americans believe that a fetus starts deserving legal protection sometime after the first trimester but before birth. I support the right to terminate one's pregnancy during the first trimester. I do not oppose requirements that ending a pregnancy in the third trimester must leave a healthy fetus alive if that is feasible. The Tenth Amendment restricts Congress to its Article I Section 8 powers: providing national defense and regulating federal land, immigration, citizenship, bankruptcy, currency, weights and measures, patents, copyrights, and commerce that crosses state or national borders. Such commerce includes only responsibilities -- pollution, transportation, flood control, infectious diseases -- whose indivisible scope clearly goes beyond the borders of a single state. Because centralization exaggerates influence by special interests, community services should be provided at the most local and voluntary way possible, so that citizens can have maximum influence on, and maximum choice among, the bundles of services that communities provide. The U.S. military budget represents half of the world's military spending -- far more than needed for ensuring our national defense. Major savings can be had by ending our efforts at nation-building in places like Iraq, ending U.S. forward ground defense of allies in Europe and Korea, reducing the size of our strategic nuclear arsenal and blue-water navy, scaling back our weapons modernization programs, and slashing missile defense efforts down to only basic research. All persons are entitled to keep the fruits of their labor, and so the Libertarian Party calls for the repeal of the income tax. The federal tax code in 2004 was 3,457 pages (plus 13,458 pages of IRS regulations), compared to 94 pages in 1928. The income tax (and 16th Amendment) should be repealed, and federal financing should come from just 1) taxes on pollution (or pollution-based commerce) that crosses state borders, 2) charges for use of interstate transportation infrastructure, and 3) per-capita taxes levied against state governments. There should be no taxation of income (wages, interest, dividends, profits, gifts, and inheritance), production (including value added), transactions (e.g. the sale, import, or export of goods and services), or wealth (e.g. real estate improvements, capital, or other assets). I favor a green tax shift to instead tax 1) pollution, 2) consumption of natural resources, 3) congestion of community resources (streets, pipes, wires), and 4) that component of land value deriving from any government services not yet privatized. Economists agree that such taxes impose the least drag (the technical term is deadweight loss) on the economy. Any tax or tax preference should only be for correcting what economics textbooks call market failures. The free rider problem justifies government financing of national defense and a universal justice system. The tragedy of the commons justifies government taxes on pollution or consumption of natural resources. The problem of natural monopoly (high fixed costs and vanishing marginal costs) justifies community provision of networks of streets, pipes, and wires. The holdout problem justifies eminent domain only if such a network requires a right-of-way. Adverse selection justifies incentives for health insurance consumers to join broad risk pools. Government should tax only land value (reflecting the expense of government services provided in the community) and the pollution, consumption, or congestion of community resources. Revenue to finance services enjoyed in a community should flow up from the landholders and sub-communities benefiting from the service, not down from a central bureaucracy with the dangerous power to tax everyone and then shift revenues and tax preferences among communities or constituencies. Political parties should be allowed to establish their own rules for nomination procedures, primaries and conventions. Libertarians call for an end to any tax-financed subsidies to candidates or parties and the repeal of all laws which restrict political speech or the voluntary financing of election campaigns. We oppose laws that effectively exclude alternative candidates and parties, deny ballot access, gerrymander districts, or deny the voters their right to consider all legitimate alternatives. The only campaign finance law should be to outlaw fraudulent reporting of campaign financing, thus allowing voters to vote against candidates with corrupt or anonymous financing. Peaceful honest adults have the right and responsibility to control their own bodies, actions, property, and use of the commons, so long as they use neither force nor fraud to
[marketliberal] Libertarian Party Adopts Pure Principles Platform
Today the Libertarian Party rewrote its Platform. The delegates to the Libertarian National Convention in Denver almost totally accepted the Platform Committee's draft http://libertarianmajority.net/pure-principles-platform platform (as amended http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/05/23/lp-platform-committee-update/ ), except for three areas where they improved on it. First, they improved the Personal Relationships plank: Sexual orientation, preference, gender, or gender identity should have no discriminatory impact on the treatment rights of individuals by government, such as in current marriage, child custody, adoption, immigration, or military service laws. Consenting adults should be free to choose their own sexual practices and personal relationships. Government does not have legitimate authority to define, license, or restrict personal relationships. Second, they adopted an abortion plank proposed by Aaron Starr that allowed the LP to still say it is pro-choice on everything: Recognizing that abortion is a sensitive issue and that people can hold good-faith views on both sides, we believe that government should be kept out of the matter, leaving the question to each person for their conscientious consideration. Finally, they removed some problematic language in the Monopolies and Corporations plank: We defend the right of individuals to form corporations, cooperatives and other types of companies based on voluntary association. We seek to divest government of all functions that can be provided by non-governmental organizations or private individuals. We oppose government subsidies to business, labor, or any other special interest. Industries should be governed by free markets and held to strict liability. The unofficial text of the 2008 LP Platform is at http://libertarianmajority.net/2008-lp-platform.
[marketliberal] Knapp endorses PlatCom's 2008 platform
Tom Knapp, editor of Rational Review, founder of the Boston Tea Party, and author of its World's Smallest Political Platform, has endorsed the LP Platform Committee's plank proposals (but not its tweak to the Statement of Principles): http://knappster.blogspot.com/2008/05/digression-my-platform-endorsement.htm l
[marketliberal] Dead Sea Scrolls: the 1972 LP Temporary Platform
Hooray for D. Frank Robinson, Chair of the original 1972 LP Constitution and Bylaws Committee, for today posting the original Temporary LP Platform: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LPplatform-discuss/files/LP%20temp%20Platform% 201972/ It's very similar to the Platform adopted in 1972, except even more explicitly minarchist in a few key sentences. There is one noteworthy difference that I want to immediately propose adopting in Denver. The language in green below (i.e. everything after and so) is all from the Temporary Platform, and the preceding red language is from the 2004 Platform. (I'm on the fence about whether to keep the third sentence.) 2.2. Environment and Resources Individuals have the right to homestead unowned resources. Pollution of other people's property is a violation of individual rights, and so we support effective and judicious anti-pollution laws. Such laws must set forth objective standards for determining what are reasonable and unreasonable emissions. In recognition that much of our pollution problem has arisen because air and water are treated as free, we shall work for the establishment of pricing mechanisms based on property rights in the air and water -- thus providing economic sanctions against pollution. We oppose all attempts to transform anti-pollution efforts into a general movement against technology, or the use of anti-pollution efforts to destroy personal freedom. I also propose this short and sweet Energy plank, recycled from 1976 language: 2.3. Energy We oppose all government control of energy pricing, allocation, and production. We oppose liability limits for nuclear accidents, and favor privatization of the atomic energy industry.
[marketliberal] Root, Gravel, and Plumb Lines
Each of the http://libertarianmajority.net/major-schools-of-libertarianism has its own particular plumb line (of varying precision). Root is arguably closer to the Reason/Cato plumb line than Gravel is to his nearest libertarian plumb line, which would be something like that of the geolibertarian Democratic Freedom Caucus. If Gravel would just say that his education and healthcare safety net should only be provided at the local community level and only financed through community collection of ground rent, then it seems he'd be as good a geolibertarian as Root is a Reason/Cato cosmolibertarian. David Nolan writes http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/04/01/gravel-and-root-get-scrappy-over-libe rtarianism/ that Gravel has been misled into believing that the so-called reform libertarians are the majority within the LP, and they are not. If reformers/moderates aren't the majority within the LP, then why did the PlatCom draft's reform/moderate planks get 80% - 90% approval in the survey http://www.lp.org/platformrecommendation.pdf results that came out this week?
[marketliberal] Environmental Kuznets Curves and Pigovian Taxes
There's just no question in the economic literature whether environmnental quality is what is called a normal good -- i.e., one that is demanded more as incomes grow. See e.g. Environmental http://www.arts.usask.ca/economics/faculty/papers/Bruneau_Echevarria_dp_200 3-5.pdf Quality Is A Normal Good (2003) by a couple of Canadian economists. In fact, if you search on the phrase environmental quality is a normal good, you find lots of papers by economists asserting this. The underlying phenomenon is called the Environmental Kuznets Curve, which is described in Wikipedia thus: Another situation where Kuznets type curves appear is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_environment the environment. It is claimed that many environmental health indicators, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_pollution water and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution air pollution, show the inverted U-shape: in the beginning of economic development, little weight is given to environmental concerns, raising pollution along with industrialization. After a threshold, when basic physical needs are met, interest in a clean environment rises, reversing the trend. Now society has the funds, as well as willingness to spend to reduce pollution. This relation holds most clearly true for a many pollutants, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_dioxide sulfur dioxide, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_oxide nitrogen oxide, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead lead, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT DDT, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbons chlorofluorocarbons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewage sewage, and many other chemicals previously released directly into the air or bodies of water. PERC (a leading market-oriented environmental think tank) writes in The Environmental Kuznets Curve: A http://www.perc.org/about.php?id=688 Primer: Since 1991, when economists first reported a systematic relationship between income changes and environmental quality, this relationship, known as the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), has become standard fare in technical conversations about environmental policy (Grossman and Krueger 1991). When first unveiled, EKCs revealed a surprising outcome: Some important indicators of environmental quality such as the levels of sulfur dioxide and particulates in the air actually improved as incomes and levels of consumption went up. Prior to the advent of EKCs, many well-informed people believed that richer economies damaged and even destroyed their natural resource endowments at a faster pace than poorer ones. They thought that environmental quality could only be achieved by escaping the clutches of industrialization and the desire for higher incomes. The EKC's paradoxical relationship cast doubt on this assumption. We now know far more about the linkages between an economy and its environment than we did before 1991. This primer shares this knowledge. [...] However, income growth without institutional reform is not likely to be enough. Improvement of the environment with income growth is not automatic but depends on policies and institutions. GDP growth creates the conditions for environmental improvement by raising the demand for improved environmental quality and makes the resources available for supplying it. Whether environmental quality improvements materialize or not, when, and how, depend critically on government policies, social institutions, and the completeness and functioning of markets. Better policies, such as the removal of distorting subsidies, the introduction of more secure property rights over resources, and the imposition of pollution taxes to connect actions taken to prices paid will flatten the underlying EKC and perhaps achieve an earlier turning point. The effects of market-based policies on environmental quality are expected to be unambiguously positive. All the mechanisms on Guy's list (posted on the private PlatCom forum) are just ways that higher-income societies seek to satisfy that demand for a cleaner environment. The only item on the list that argues against the validity of the basic point is the claim that higher-income societies can in effect export their pollution. This is called the Pollution Haven Hypothesis, and is discussed on pp. 14-17 of the full PDF http://www.perc.org/pdf/rs02_1a.pdf of the PERC primer. The empirical data suggests that any such haven effect is swamped by the EKC effect of the rising income in the haven country. Note that the EKC effect needs smart policy like pollution taxes in order to work. Pollution taxes (aka Pigovian taxes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax ) are almost universally regarded as a no-brainer in the literature of market-oriented environmentalism, and there is even a Pigou Club http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigou_Club of famous economists who are petitioning for this policy. Such anti-aggression taxes are supported by several of us on PlatCom, but the LP's radical thought police make such
[marketliberal] Debating Society vs. Real Politics
http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/03/12/sticking-a-fork-in-the-libertarian-par ty/ Bob, I think debating society vs. real politics is too much of a caricature. Yes, there are exclusivist radicals who care too much about exhibiting their self-righteousness and state-hatred and not enough about increasing liberty. But there are also pom-pom reformers who care too much about getting LP members into office and not enough about using all the tools in the electoral/political toolbox to maximally move public policy in a libertarian direction. One of Carl's old essays said garnering 5-10% of the vote at-large wins nothing. That's nonsense. If we had to choose between 1) winning 5%-10% in many federal elections and 2) winning a dozen seats on city councils and in state legislatures, it's obvious which we should choose. Even if you fantasize not about such smaller offices but about promoting these farm-team Libertarians to Congress, look how much liberty Ron Paul has been able to legislate during a couple decades there. It would take another 20 Ron Pauls before their votes in Congress would even START to move the needle. But if 5%-10% of the vote consistently went for increased economic and civil liberty, then lessarchist voters would be recognized as a crucial swing-voter bloc to which incumbent-party politicians would happily pander. Unfortunately, there are smart reform leaders who see all non-LP politicians as irredeemably evil, and while they don't quite say we need to breed LP congressmen in vitro, they are convinced that Congress will only vote for more liberty when it is 51% controlled by LP members who started their careers getting elected to water board. So my complaint with Rockbardian/anarchist radicals is not that they want to debate. My complaint is that they DON'T want to debate. They instead want the LP to be a Rockbardian purity-certifying society, whose sacred scrolls declare it beyond debate that Rockbardian anarchism is the only principled school of libertarianism. They have no qualms about engaging in any kind of retail politics -- as long as it is used to proclaim (rather than question or debate) their purity and their hatred of the state. The votes and dues of other kinds of libertarians are entirely welcome, as long as they genuflect to all the Rockbardian idols, and don't try to make the LP ecumenical towards other schools of libertarianism. The alternative we reformers need to offer is an LP that is ecumenical towards all the major schools of libertarianism. We need to offer an LP that seeks to unite all the voters who want both more personal liberty and more economic liberty behind the electoral choices that will most move public policy in a libertarian direction. We need to offer an LP that has enough faith in markets and competition to believe that any step toward increased individual choice and responsibility will only build the empirical case for more such steps. We need to offer an LP that has enough intellectual self-confidence and faith in the marketplace of ideas to believe that libertarianism is not a flickering candle that can be extinguished by a stray breath from the impure, but rather is an intellectual bonfire that will set a blaze in the hearts of anyone who wants more liberty, and will suck the oxygen from anyone who wants less.
[marketliberal] RE: [CALPCandidates] Re: Platform surveys for candidates and LP leaders
OK Allen, your endorsement got me to click on the link that Kennita had posted in the standard reader-unfriendly insufficiently-contexted I-dare-you-not-to-click-on-this way: http://xkcd.com/386/ Cute cartoon, but I for one am not ready to apologize for putting some upward pressure on the collective online IQ of the LP. I see it as somewhat like changing diapers: it's not for everybody, and there surely will come a day when I no longer do it and enjoy the extra time freed up thereby, but I will still think it needed doing, and I will remember that it was not completely without any desirable consequences. But you're right that, to the extent that candidates and LP leaders aren't interested in stating where they stand with respect to the No 1st Force Pledge and the 18 quotes from the 2004 Platform, then this thread is not a good use of this forum. Heck, I couldn't even get Starchild to take any such stand, and he's the one who started the thread. :-)
[marketliberal] Is libertarianism a bonfire or a candle?
Starchild wrote: SC) getting our party back on track with a renewed focus on ideology and libertarian ideas (SC Right -- and there are more than one principled variety of libertarian ideology: * Major http://libertarianmajority.net/major-schools-of-libertarianism Schools Of Libertarianism * Free http://libertarianmajority.net/free-variables-in-libertarian-theory Variables in Libertarian Theory SC) and less hype about winning elections. (SC I agree that merely winning elections is too narrow and naive a strategy. The LP's job should be to unite all the voters who seek both more personal liberty and more economic liberty behind the electoral choices that will most move public policy in a libertarian direction. Do you disagree? SC) It's difficult to understand how Libertarians, of all people, could be so naive and shortsighted as to risk putting the pursuit of power ahead of the pursuit of liberty as a practical goal of their organization (SC What's naive is to think that devotion to ZAPsolutism is some guarantee against losing one's way. When I try to think of examples of arguable sell-outs from the libertarian movement, the first ones to spring to mind are some of our most prominent anarchists: Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell, and Burt Blumert backing GOP candidates like Pat Buchanan in the 1990s; Bill Evers going to work for George Bush in Iraq and in the Education Department; and Dana Rohrabacher choosing a career in Congress over fidelity to the movement. (Alan Greenspan and Gale Norton might also make the list, but I don't know much about their pre-mainstream days.) Meanwhile, what happened to Crane team that the original Radical Caucus viciously shunned out of the LP for heresies like using the slogan low-tax liberal and advocating that the nanny state be repealed in a particular order? They went into the very bowels of the Beltway and braved its corrupting influences to make the Cato Institute a far more effective advocate for liberty over the last quarter century than the LP has ever been -- and they did it without a Pledge or a 7/8-protected Statement of Principles or even (as far as I know) a secret handshake. SC) We must continually teach and reinforce the libertarian ideas of Non-Aggression, individual rights, and freedom, or risk our movement fatally losing its way in the political swamp through which we are all struggling to wade. (SC Given the long list of radical LP leaders -- Rothbard, Evers, Garris, Raimondo, Franzi, Costello, Hunter, Weber, Rockwell, Blumert -- who went on to abandon either the LP or their radicalism or both, I would suggest that simplistic exclusivist ZAPsolutism casts an ultimately brittle spell, and that the LP should be more ecumenical to the various schools of principled libertarianism. An LP that defines itself with a narrow version of libertarianism has an ultimately more brittle ideological immune system, while simultaneously losing opportunities for Libertarians to gravitate toward the more robust schools of libertarianism through competition in the marketplace of ideas. In particular, I wish LP radicals had the courage of their convictions to believe that their brand of libertarianism would only grow and flourish in a big-tent LP that didn't make people genuflect to the radical school at the door. My libertarianism is a roaring bonfire; why do you act like yours is a flickering candle?
[marketliberal] Hogarth's magic 8 ball
http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/03/01/the-educational-wing-of-the-libertaria n-party/ Susan, you can spin it all you want, but the bottom line is that you don't have the courage of your convictions if you call it fear-mongering for Carl to straightforwardly report that you would terminate Medicare and Medicaid next week if you could. We'll just have to agree to disagree over whether it's encouraging micro-aggression when you announce that henceforth, micro-aggression will only be policed when its victims are willing to pay for targeting, contesting, winning, and enforcing a tort claim the cost of which is many orders of magnitude higher than the cost of the damages involved. This one is just too obvious to bother debating. It's also simply laughable to suggest that it would require an omniscient being who could See All and Know All and understand perfectly the interplay between cause-and-effect perfectly to know whether letting tailpipe emissions go un-taxed would lead to more of them than otherwise. If the future is such an impenetrable opaque void to you, maybe you should end your campaign for LNC and leave the steering of the Party to people who can see far enough into the future to anticipate whether maybe -- just maybe -- the sun might rise tomorrow morning. We're talking about taxing gasoline so that a million micro-aggressing commuters don't create so much of the smog I see as I type this looking out over Silicon Valley. Your comment about murder[ing] tens of thousands of innocents is of course a red-herring attempt to change the subject, but I'm happy to point readers to the debate you lost with me over how/whether to end the Japanese empire's genocidal war of aggression: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2393. I completely agree that the only thing you advocate doing against aggression is add[ing] a '+1' to the non-aggressors column -- and that's why I think you're not as libertarian as I am. I know you feel the opposite is the case. The most important difference between us remains that you think the LP's foundational texts should declare your clean-hands principles to be more libertarian than my anti-aggression principles, whereas I hold that the LP should be more ecumenical in cases where people like you and me each think that the other hasn't come far enough on the path of libertarian intellectual development.
[marketliberal] vagueness, and a $1000 bounty for a better LP issue than abortion
Eric, it's true that the PlatCom's current draft is more about timeless principles of policy direction then it is about a legislative agenda for the next four years. The reality is that we won't have any LP-authored legislation being enacted in the next four years, just as we don't really have any legislative accomplishments from the last four years to brag about. For more information, see http://libertarianmajority.net/campaign-program. Note that there is an effort getting under way to propose in Denver either a campaign program or a suite of current-policy resolutions. I'll post more information here as it develops. It's a little unfair to single out abortion as an example of the PlatCom draft's vagueness, because the PlatCom deliberately chose to straddle this divisive issue. (We also chose placeholder language for education and the environment, so stay tuned for specifics in those areas.) The Ron-Paul-style federalist approach you propose was in fact the second most popular option (since I count our straddling language as substantively indistinguishable from the outright silence option). I prefer your approach to the straddling language we adopted, but my favorite approach is still this: The http://knowinghumans.net/2007/12/undefended-popular-high-ground-on.html Undefended Popular High Ground On Abortion. I'm now increasing to $1000 my bounty for any similarly significant position that ANY of the top five parties (D, R, G, LP, CP) could take (but hasn't yet) where both 60% of their members and 60% of Americans would currently accept it and it is not already staked out by any of the other four parties. I doubt this situation has ever occurred in American politics before, but I'm not yet confident enough to bet that it hasn't happened before now.
[marketliberal] Phillies compares Obama on civil unions to Gov. Faubus
http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/03/05/phillies-blasts-obama-on-gblt-issues/ The 2004 LP Platform said: We oppose adding women to the pool of those eligible for and subject to the draft, not because we think that as a rule women are unfit for combat, but because we believe that this step enlarges the number of people subjected to government tyranny. If gays qua gays were exempt from draft registration, would the Outright Libertarians say the same thing about LGBTQ folk as the 2004 Platform said above for women? I would hope that the Libertarians would oppose such blatantly bigoted government policies, even when they nominally decrease aggression against the targeted minority. George, I applaud the intent behind your effort to use gay marriage a wedge issue against gay-friendly Democrats, but I'd be surprised if someone as smart as you could think of no significant differences between Obama's support for separate but equal marriage for gays and segregationists' support for separate but equal schools for blacks. If we defenders of gay rights can advocate marriage equality as a path toward privatizing marriage, might not Obama simply be a friend of gay rights who sees civil unions as a path toward marriage equality? Is invoking Faubus supposed to suggest that Obama can be assumed to be somehow bigoted against gays? Wouldn't suggesting that run the risk of alienating the same gay-friendly voters we're trying to peel away from Obama? To ask it another way: when polls show that the 35% of Americans who support gay marriage rises to 53% when including supporters of civil unions, are we libertarians mistaken in saying that more than half of Americans want to move toward greater marriage equality for gays? Are you saying the 18% of Americans who support civil unions but not gay marriage are as bad on gay rights as Southern segregationists were on black rights? Searches against the Outright web site and blog reveal no definitive stance on whether advocacy of civil unions is commendable, but various postings suggest that it's at least a tepid step in the right direction. I tend to agree. Until we can get the government out of marriage, we can at least get the government's anti-gay bigotry out of marriage. And until we do that, we can at least use civil unions to bring immediate and practical relief to LGBTQ Americans while they add to the overwhelming evidence that their relationships are not a threat to anybody's values or institutions.
[marketliberal] RE: [LPplatform-discuss] a $1000 bounty for a better LP issue than abortion
michael.h.wilson wrote: MW) as far as I know no party has specifically called for an end of the deployment of U.S. troops abroad (MW This policy doesn't really meet my criteria -- supported by 60% of Americans, 60% of Libertarians, not traditionally advocated by the LP, and not advocated by any of the other top four parties. First, the Constitution party effectively already advocates this: immediately terminate American military presence in all foreign countries where such U.S. presence constitutes an invitation for this nation to become involved in, or further participate in, foreign wars. Second, the LP Platform has traditionally advocated this position: End the practice of stationing American military troops overseas. We make no exceptions to the above. The current Platform still says The United States government should return to the historic libertarian tradition of avoiding entangling alliances, abstaining totally from foreign quarrels and imperialist adventures. Third, nowhere near 60% of Americans support such a position. As of Dec 2007, only 28% of Americans said we should withdraw all of its troops from Iraq as rapidly as possible, starting now, and only 59% thought there should be any timetable at all for withdrawal. I would guess that under 25% of Americans would agree with this position. Finally, I seriously doubt that 60% of LP members would say we should end all deployment of U.S. troops abroad. 60% of NatCon delegates might say that, but I bet you wouldn't get the 67% needed for a resoluton that said it. So it looks like my $1000 is still up for grabs. :-)
[marketliberal] [LPplatform-discuss] Purpose of the Platform
Michael Wilson wrote: MW) You don't sell a car by saying it is better than some other brand. You have to show people why it is better. (MW You don't sell a car by handing the owner's manual to prospective buyers when they walk into the showroom Why would we want to write our marketing brochure with a committee of 20+ members, barred from doing official drafting work except in person, constrained to modify the brochure only once every two years, with a mandatory plank structure, mandatory Statement of Principles prefix, 7/8 hypermajority approval of changes to the SoP, mandatory retention of the previous brochure, a minority report system for dissenting drafts, complicated token-based plank retention voting, per-plank 2/3 approval of all changes via 15-minute debates among hundreds of delegates, optional challenge to the Judicial Committee, and mandatory binding of our presidential ticket to its every provision? The LP already has some very good brochures: * The 2004 Libertarian Viewpoint http://marketliberal.org/LP/Docs/2004%20Libertarian%20Viewpoint.pdf LP pamphlet * The 2006 New Vision For America http://marketliberal.org/LP/Docs/2006%20A%20New%20Vision%20For%20America.pd f LP pamphlet * The New York LP Trifold http://www.ny.lp.org/literature/lpny-trifold.pdf pamphlet * The 2000 Harry http://www.harrybrowne.org/hb2000/misc/trifold.pdf Browne Trifold pamphlet * The Texas LP Short and http://www.tx.lp.org/docs/ShortSimple2006LPT.pdf Simple pamphlet * The LP On Today's http://www.lp.org/issues/issues.shtml Issues on lp.org * The Official LP Program as of 2004 http://web.archive.org/web/20040618162903/www.lp.org/issues/program/ * The 2000-2003 LP National Campaign Platform http://web.archive.org/web/20030207233840/www.lp.org/issues/campplat/ * The Vermont LP http://vtlp.org/main/issues.asp Platform * The http://ca.lp.org/program/Program2006-2007.pdf California LP Program The LP's problems won't be solved by putting the word Platform on the cover of one of these excellent marketing documents. The Platform just needs to be a reference tool for -- and to remove obstacles confronting -- our sales force (the candidates) and the opinion leaders who evaluate them. Too many of us fantasize (as I sometimes do) about the Platform being a sales tool, whose cover-to-cover reading will make the scales fall from voters' eyes. The Platform Committee should not try to be a sales or marketing team. Those are important jobs and some people here may be very good at them, but they aren't the role of a Platform Committee. We are not going to be writing any spells or incantations with magical powers of persuasion -- especially not through the Platform process. There are already entire libraries of such spells already tuned to the speaker, the audience, the medium, the locale, and other circumstances. Our sales force -- our candidates -- do not need a one-size-fits-all script written for them. They will adjust their sales pitch to their audience no matter what the Platform says. The Platform's job is to set guideposts for the direction and outline of the broad path we want them to show to their various audiences -- and then get the hell out of these candidates' way.
[marketliberal] [cal-libs] Miller fails to embrace limitations on government, as predicted
Brian Miller wrote: BM) Simply put, Mr. Holtz, if you cannot tell the difference (BM I'm just applying your own logic of what constitutes libertarian-ness, and testing my suspicion that it's ad hoc and tailored to your personal political agenda. BM) between the United Nations (a multinational, undemocratic treaty-driven organization with no accountability to the citizenry) and the Constitution of the United States of America (the most liberating political and legal document in human history, imposing restraints on every level of government to ensure the perpetual liberty of US citizens), (BM When the U.S. was 60 years old like the U.N. is, it was arguably a multi-state undemocratic treaty-driven organization too. The Presidency was determined by an electoral college, and the Senate was elected by the legislatures of the states who were treaty signatories. Only one half of one of the three branches of government was subject to direct popular election, and even then the franchise was almost exclusively restricted to property-owning white males. (I wouldn't be surprised if there had been religious restrictions on franchise in some places, too. And I'll let you educate me about how easy it was for openly gay people to vote.) At any rate, true libertarians know that democracy is not necessarily any great friend of liberty. Oh, and there was the small matter of the Constitution explicitly condoning the existence of chattel slavery. When the Constitution was 60 years old, it did not significantly impose restraints on every level of government against infringements of individual liberty. That didn't really begin to happen until the Constitution was 79 years old -- right around the time that the aforementioned (and other) defects in the Constitution enabled a cataclysmic civil war that slaughtered fully 2% of our population. Scaled up to the current constituency of the U.N., that would be 134 million people dead. The U.N. hasn't dropped the ball nearly that badly, even over its entire existence. BM) If your plan to grow the Libertarian Party (BM Don't worry about my plan, just check the LP's own decades-old Preamble to our Platform. It says As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty [...] Our goal is nothing more nor less than a world set free in our lifetime. The changes that the LP seeks to make to the U.S. federal government are many orders of magnitude greater than it would take to allow the U.N.'s International Court of Justice to hear appeals by U.S. citizens against any level of American government for violations of articles 1-21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You told us Libertarians have no problem enthusiastically embracing limitations on government. So why wouldn't you enthusiastically embrace the prospect of such a limitation? After all, that's a prospect much more practical than much of the anarchotopian daydreaming in which the LP Platform has traditionally indulged. BM) and change our platform is to compare our present federal system of checks and balances and Constitutional order that protects the rights of all individual citizens to the corrupt and unaccountable United Nations (BM Are you certifying the U.S. federal government as a paragon of accountability and incorruptibility? That's not what Libertarians usually do. I'm glad to see I'm not the only Libertarian who defends the U.S. government, for all its criminal policies and shameful deeds, as the single institution that has done more to advance the cause of liberty than any other in human history. As it happens, there are very good reasons for preferring that individual rights in early 21st-century America should be protected at the level of the federal judiciary, rather than at the level of state governments or at the level of the U.N. However, as your groping response would suggest, those reasons are empirical matters of historical contingency, and have vanishingly little to do with the abstract libertarian principle of embracing limitations on government. Seventy years ago, when the federal government was just as bad as the various states on civil liberties, and was leading the assault on our economic liberties, it would indeed have been preferable to limit federal jurisdiction as much as possible in precisely the way that 72-year-old Ron Paul suggests. Seventy years from now, it's just possible to imagine that the American experiment in limited government will have finished collapsing into a total nanny/chaperone state, and that technology-driven policy competition among ~200 nation-states will have made the U.N. a better advocate of liberty than the U.S. federal government. The bottom line remains: you are taking an empirical and contingent Ron Paul judgment about the current institutional design of our government, and mendaciously trying to claim it as evidence that Ron Paul desires an entire suite of chaperone-state policies that you can't quote him endorsing and that I quote
RE: [marketliberal] Platform Committee Report v. Restore 04 v. 2006
Thomas L. Knapp wrote: TK) The Restoration Caucus proposal would restore the 2004 platform, which does not include the 2006 Sexuality and Gender plank. (TK Their thinking about the merits of the glorious three-decade legacy of the LP Platform has, um, evolved quite rapidly in the few short weeks after their petition was drafted. First, Nolan began acknowledging that the PlatCom has been producing actual work, based on multiple past platforms. Then, he started saying that the goal of the Restoration Caucus is to undo the Portland deletions but keep the Portland consolidations and refinements. After that, he conceded that the number of planks would still be too many, and that significant plank consolidation has suddenly become advisable after a quarter-century of platforms with 60+ planks. Now, Rob Power has finally posted the text of what is apparently the leading contender to be the Restoration Caucus' draft proposal, at http://robpower.com/platform/, and it's a complete re-organization that is nothing like the 2004/2006 hybrid they were hinting at. By now it bears very little resemblance to what the Restore04 petition signatories were told they were asking for. All this has happened in roughly 9 weeks. It's 11 weeks to Denver, so I have no idea what their proposals will be looking like by then. Meanwhile, the PlatCom remains pure evil for allegedly not considering the phantom Restore04 proposal as it evolved in secret, hidden from our view.
[marketliberal] [cal-libs] Miller's ignorance re: carbon tax popularity
Brian Miller wrote: BM) No crazy theories, slaveholder-era political theories, or crazy complicated schemes (BM You can use such low-brow name-calling against the political thinking of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison if you want, but very few of the rest of us -- libertarians particularly or Americans generally -- will agree with you. Thank you for failing to address any of the facts in my comparison of the U.S. Constitution at age 60 with the U.N. at age 60, and for failing to quote Ron Paul actually saying that the rest of the Bill of Rights (beyond the Congress-shall-make-no-law First Amendment) does not bind the states. BM) With your bizarre package of revoking the jurisdiction of the constitution over state and local government, (BM I've never advocated that, and I've told you repeatedly that I disagree with Ron Paul on the wisdom and textual basis of that position. Thus instead of addressing the facts I cite, you simply make up your own facts about what I believe, just like you've made up your own facts about what Ron Paul believes (e.g. that he is a statist on health care and voted for continued government spending on education). BM) carbon taxes, etc., you seem intent on transforming our party from a mainstream movement for individual liberty into some sort of freak-show laboratory for fringe-movement extremism. (BM LOL. I'm the guy working to drain from the LP Platform its extremist poison -- like personal secession, immediate non-enforcement of all tax laws, and privatization of all streets. I have a list of 18 such extremist passages from the 2004 LP Platform at http://libertarianmajority.net/pure-principles-faq#2004Extremism. I defy you to come up with such a list for the Pure Principles http://libertarianmajority.net/pure-principles-platform draft that will be voted on in Denver. Answering such a challenge would be trivial for someone who isn't fact-impaired, but would of course not be attempted by a smear artist. Speaking of fact-impaired, you're simply ignorant about whether carbon taxes are mainstream. 65% of Californians favor http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/printer_70023.shtml a carbon tax if the tax revenues are spent solely on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And this isn't just in green-friendly California. 64% of Americans support http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/427.php?lb=hmpg1; pnt=427nid=id= a revenue-neutral shift of taxation onto energy consumption, and similar results obtain around the world: Italy (69%), South Korea (70%), the Philippines (66%), Brazil (65%), Egypt (82%), Mexico (64%), Kenya (78%), Spain (73%), France (79%), Turkey (78%), Russia (75%) and India (66%). Meanwhile, your fellow Outright leader Rob Power is promoting a draft LP Platform that restores the kooky 2004 provisions for individual secession and immediate non-enforcement of all tax laws. Will you be lecturing him about fringe-movement extremism before Denver, or not?
[marketliberal] RE: [cal-libs] federalism is neither unlibertarian nor about slavery
Brian Miller wrote: BM) We're not discussing federalism and decentralism. (BM Ron Paul is, but you're trying to pretend he's talking about slavery. BM) We're discussing states' rights (BM It's ludicrous for you to suggest that Ron Paul's states' rights position is more about slavery than it is about federalism. BM) -- specifically, Ron Paul's position that the Bill of Rights does not apply to state and local governments. (BM I too suspect he believes that at least in part, but can you quote him saying that? As I said yesterday, I tried but could only confirm him 1) saying that about the Congress-shall-make-no-law 1st Amendment, and 2) disagreeing with the 14th Amendment Incorporation Doctrine. Can you do any better? BM) Please *do* stick to the topic at hand. (BM ROTFL. Slavery isn't the topic at hand. The topic at hand is whether it's unlibertarian to advocate that the power to protect individual liberty should be centralized versus distributed among sovereign state governments. Do you have the intellectual courage to address this topic, or not? By the way, I note that you're now even fleeing from the topic you desperately wanted to switch to -- viz., your claim that states' rights doctrine was created as an underpinning to justify slavery. I cited evidence to the contrary, and dared you to claim that Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson thought that the best thing about the concept of states' sovereignty was that it would help preserve the institution of slavery. Do you have the intellectual courage to answer this point, or not? BM) what is my narrow and self-involved agenda? (BM I'll give you a hint. You've touted exactly one scorecard for presidential candidates, and it focuses on issues covered by only one (or if you squint, maybe two) of the 62 planks of the 2004 LP Platform -- or 2 out of the 27 planks of the PlatCom's draft, take your pick. Does that help?
[marketliberal] Miller unlibertarian for not embracing UN limitations on federal government?
Brian Miller wrote: BM) Here's what he said about the First Amendment (BM Yes, I already said that Paul takes the First Amendment literally where it says Congress shall make no law. I challenged you to quote Paul saying that the rest of the Bill of Rights should not apply to the states. Thanks for failing to do so. BM) Under a Ron Paul society, state governments could [...] (BM Your statement would be true if you had begun it Under Ron Paul's interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, . As you wrote it, it remains false. I repeat an actual quote about a Ron Paul society, which of course you will again ignore: RP) A free country is designed for individuals to deal with the subject of virtue and excellence. Once we defer to the government to get involved in worrying about our own virtue and our excellence and perfect fair economies, it is done at the sacrifice of liberty. If we do that, and sacrifice that liberty, and the job of virtue and excellence is taken over by the government, you can only do that through tyranny. [...] If you want to change people, you change them through persuasion, through family values, through church values, but you can't do it through legislation, because force doesn't work. (RP And who did Paul say this to? One of the many Libertarian Party functions that he's spoken at throughout the years? No, he said this straight to the faces of the conservative Christian Values Voter conference. BM) Libertarians have no problem enthusiastically embracing limitations on government. (BM Yes, and Ron Paul embraces the Constitution as a limitation on the federal government. QED. I challenge you again: do you or do you not enthusiastically embrace the U.N. having the power to enforce as a limitation on the American federal government all the provisions of articles 1-21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or sections 6-27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights? (If you're unfamiliar with them, you can for the sake of argument accept my stipulation that those provisions define far better protections of individual rights than does the Bill of Rights.) So how about it? Don't wait for the translation, just answer the question. If you dare. And if you're really feeling brave, I challenge you to assert this: I want the federal government to do for other civil rights what it's done for substance use and campaign speech and warrantless monitoring and gun rights and 'hate crimes' and reproductive technology and digital copying technology. BM) None of those state capitals could be described, even remotely, as libertopias. (BM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawman David Terry already cited Oregon's assisted suicide law and a dozen states that have passed medicinal marijuana laws over federal government opposition suppression. I don't dare mention developments regarding gay marriage rights in Hawaii and Massachusetts, because you might claim you're being lectured by a straight white suburban guy about esoterica that he can't possibly understand.
[marketliberal] Get gummint out of healthcare
http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/03/01/the-educational-wing-of-the-libertaria n-part Susan, are you saying you would not terminate Medicare and Medicaid next week? If so, then when would you terminate them? If not, then how is Carl's characterization fear-mongering? As Rothbard's intellectual love-child, do you oppose all timetables for destatization, or not? On Aug 10 you wrote to Bob: I'm not sure that any amount of goodwill or respect toward others could honestly make me call someone who embraces the idea of initiating force against others to accomplish something they desire a libertarian. Does your statement hold even if what they desire is to police aggression (e.g. through pollution taxes) or to provide access to justice (e.g. by letting the criminally accused subpoena innocent third-party witnesses)? Michael, do you find Susan's five-way repetition of get gummint out of health care any less vague about actually addressing America's healthcare problems than the LP literature you rightfully complained about?
[marketliberal] Hogarth defines non-anarchists as non-libertarian
http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/03/01/the-educational-wing-of-the-libertaria n-party/ Carl, are you saying that informed consenting adults should not be allowed to try medicines not approved by the federal government? Nobody is denying the possibility of deceit and asymmetric information in the pharmaceuticals market, but I don't see any need for government intervention other than to police fraud and perhaps protect an extremely limited form of patent rights. Why do you think that a combination of fraud case law and secondary markets (e.g. Consumer Reports) wouldn't eliminate the need for an FDA? You should check out http://www.fdareview.org/, a project of the brilliant libertarian economists Dan Klein and Alex Tabarrok. Susan, you didn't answer my question about how Carl's characterization of you terminating Medicare/Medicaid is fear-mongering. Thank you for in effect admitting you consider to be non-libertarian anyone isn't an anarchist. You earlier gave a contradictory but much more defensible definition that a person is more or less libertarian according to the amount of aggression (including taxation) he advocates. I would counter that a person is more or less libertarian according to the aggregate amount of aggression that would be 1) conducted by the political structures she advocates and 2) enabled by the absence of the political structures she opposes. In other words, I think libertarianism is more about opposing aggression than it is about abstaining from it. For example, I don't agree that it's optimally libertarian to give a green light to all aggression where the damage it causes is less than the cost to the victim of targeting, contesting, winning, and enforcing a tort claim against the aggressor -- assuming the victim is even able to bear those costs. Steve Kubby calls pollution taxes the fox guarding the chicken coop, but his alternative is to declare open season on baby chicks if they're small enough. We can debate the merits of taxing aggression all you want, but the larger point here is that you apparently admit you want to monopolize the label libertarian for only one of the various principled schools of libertarianism -- viz., anarchism. Since your Radical Caucus is devoted to educating LP members about the Party's core principles, perhaps you could clarify if there are any positions regarding these 17 free variables in libertarian theory that also disqualify one from being a Hogarth-certified libertarian: http://libertarianmajority.net/free-variables-in-libertarian-theory. Glen Rogers wrote ) The problem might be less a lack of focus and purpose but rather having marginal characters like Mr. Holtz, Mr. Capozzi and Miss Hogarth as your spokesmen is offensive to those constituencies most drawn to the small government message. ( Glen, please quote anything I've ever said that you think is offensive to those constituencies most drawn to the small government message. Regarding economic theory, I would love for you to point me to the places in the collected works of Leonard Read where he deals with developments like * The 1939 generalization of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_optimality Pareto optimality by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldor-Hicks_efficiency Kaldor and Hicks to launch modern http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_economics welfare economics; * The 1950 formalization of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_Dilemma Prisoner's Dilemma and the subsequent avalanche of developments in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory#Economics_and_business game theory; * Arrow's 1951 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_Impossibility_Theorem impossibility theorem, leading to Sen's 1970 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_paradox liberal paradox; * The 1953 discovery of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allais_paradox Allais paradox, and many subsequent discoveries about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality bounded rationality and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_biases cognitive bias and the development of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_theory Prospect Theory by Tversky and Khaneman in 1979; * Samuelson's 1954 formalization of the theory of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_goods public goods; * Tiebout's 1956 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiebout_sorting theorem about the optimal local provision of public goods; * Coase's 1959 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem proof that markets can handle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality negative externalities only in the absence of transaction costs; * The 1962 creation of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory public choice theory by Buchanan and Tullock; and * Arrow's 1963 formalization of the problem of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_information asymmetric information.
[marketliberal] RE: [cal-libs] Re: Ron Paul critics again confusing jurisprudential fact with libertarian theory
Craig Thomas wrote: CT) When did Ron Paul ever say that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the States? (CT Paul indeed calls the Incorporation Doctrine phony in saying that the First Amendment applies only to Congress: http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=259. However, that's the only one of the first Ten Amendments with such specific language (except perhaps for the Seventh). I tried to find a quote from Paul opposing the application to the states of any of the rest of the Bill of Rights, but couldn't find one. The closest I could get was at http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul120.html: RP) The Court determined that Texas had no right to establish its own standards for private sexual conduct, because gay sodomy is somehow protected under the 14th amendment right to privacy. Ridiculous as sodomy laws may be, there clearly is no right to privacy nor sodomy found anywhere in the Constitution. There are, however, states' rights - rights plainly affirmed in the Ninth and Tenth amendments. Under those amendments, the State of Texas has the right to decide for itself how to regulate social matters like sex, using its own local standards. But rather than applying the real Constitution and declining jurisdiction over a properly state matter, the Court decided to apply the imaginary Constitution and impose its vision on the people of Texas. (RP Note that Paul is wrong to claim that states' rights are covered by the Ninth Amendment; they're only covered by the Tenth. Note also that the Fourth Amendment is clearly related to privacy: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. The above suggests that Paul doesn't believe the Fourth Amendment applies to the states, though it's possible that he just thinks that 1) the 14th Amendment isn't what makes the 4th apply to the states, and 2) the 4th amendment is only about criminal procedure, not generic privacy. I did find an interesting essay http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul201.html by Paul endorsing various aspects of the 2004 http://web.archive.org/web/20050207203213/www.texasgop.org/library/RPTPlatf orm2004.pdf Texas Republican Platform. All of the aspects he mentions are things that libertarians would almost universally agree with, except for one sentence. The only hint that Paul might agree with the most unlibertarian parts of that Platform (e.g. p. 10 re: homosexuality and pornography) is when he says: On dozens of other issues, from abortion to activist judges to religious freedom, the Texas Republican party promotes true conservative values and strict adherence to the Constitution. However, there are indeed dozens of issues in that 24-page platform for which libertarians can agree with the Texas GOP position.
[marketliberal] constitutionalists don't whine about SCOTUS upholding the Constitution
Brian Miller wrote on cal-libs: BM) Every time [the Supreme Court] upholds the Constitution, conservatives whine about judicial activism overruling the will of the majority. (BM ROTFL. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_in_exile BM) Libertarians would certainly prefer a society where the overreaching of the neocons dies after a decade of court action, than a states' rights society where individuals who don't wish to see their black neighbors considered property of another man have no option but to move to another state. (BM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
[marketliberal] RE: [cal-libs] Ron Paul critics again confusing jurisprudential fact with libertarian theory
Ron Getty wrote: RG) Perhaps you or anyone can show me factual evidence in the US Constitution or a state constitution that any legislature has the right to impose by fiat laws any form of morals or ethics or civics on anyone under any circumstances. (RG It's indisputable that the U.S. Constitution, as amended by the Bill of Rights, left wide latitude to the states. The Tenth Amendment says: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. The only factual dispute here is the extent to which the 14th Amendment applies the Bill of Rights to the states. I think it should be interpreted as doing so, but I don't think disagreeing makes Ron Paul unlibertarian. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_doctrine for more information. RG) Any person claiming to be a card carrying dues paying member of the Libertarian party or espousing libertarian values who believed any government state or federal under any circumstances has the right to impose such by fiat or jurisprudence should not be a Libertarian (RG I'll keep saying it until one of you Paul critics bother to read it: You conflate two distinct things: 1) Paul's belief that as a matter of jurisprudential fact under our system of government, states have the power to regulate the sex lives of consenting adults, and 2) Paul's alleged belief that states should use that power to regulate the sex lives of consenting adults. In short, you're confusing what is with what ought to be. RG) If Ron Paul does not outright and vocally condemn the state of Texas for its sex laws or drug laws or any such moral imposition laws, and pushes for their immediate repeal (RG David Friedman has already addressed this complaint: http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2008/01/ron-paul-libertarianism-and.html. Brian Miller wrote: BM) Ron Paul insists that states' rights bring liberty (and take precedence over individual rights); (BM Again: he asserts that precedence as a matter of jurisprudential fact and as a recommendation regarding the institutional design of government, saying that individual rights should be protected at the most local level possible, and not at the most central level possible. You cannot quote Ron Paul asserting as a matter of normative ethical theory that so-called rights of states should trump individual rights. I doubt that Paul even considers rights of states to be on the same ethical level as individual rights, since he constantly repeats the basic libertarian tenet that rights inhere only in individuals, not groups. You know very well that state's rights is shorthand for the principle of federalism that the central government should not usurp the role and responsibilities of state and local governments. BM) in Ron Paul's ideal America, the drug warriors, the sex police, and the government censors would thrive at a state and local level (BM Again, you confuse Ron Paul's ideal America with Ron Paul's ideal interpretation of the federal Constitution. To know what Ron Paul thinks states should do with the power that the Constitution leaves to them, let's just ask him. He says: A free country is designed for individuals to deal with the subject of virtue and excellence. Once we defer to the government to get involved in worrying about our own virtue and our excellence and perfect fair economies, it is done at the sacrifice of liberty. If we do that, and sacrifice that liberty, and the job of virtue and excellence is taken over by the government, you can only do that through tyranny. [...] If you want to change people, you change them through persuasion, through family values, through church values, but you can't do it through legislation, because force doesn't work. BM) States' rights doctrines inevitably lead towards majoritarian oppression (BM It would be absurd to claim that federalization of rights protection hasn't led to majoritarian oppression in the areas I cited and that you again ignored: substance use and campaign speech and warrantless monitoring and gun rights and hate crimes and reproductive technology and digital copying technology. I happen to agree that it's possible and indeed advisable sometimes to centralize the protection of negative liberty while avoiding the nanny-state imposition of positive liberties. However, the historical record is decidedly mixed, and it's just not intellectually serious to call it unlibertarian to fear what happens when rights protection is centralized. I challenge you to explain why (or whether) you think that the protection of individual rights shouldn't be moved up from the federal judiciary to the United Nations. If you don't think it should be, then I could accuse you of being unlibertarian for advocating nation-state's rights -- if I were the sort of person you are. BM) Policy prescriptions have consequences. (BM The institutional design of government has even
[marketliberal] RE: [CALPCandidates] CANDIDATE STATEMENT - DUE MARCH 7TH!
Pam, that is an excellent candidate statement, loaded with lots of good details about how our fiscally conservative positions are relevant to Sacramento. My only suggestions for improvement would be two. First, it would be good to include some socially liberal issues, to differentiate you (and the LP) from the Republicans. There's almost nothing in your statement that the typical Republican opponent would disagree with. Second, it would be good to include explicit statement of the fact that the LP is the only party that has evolved beyond the obsolete left-vs-right false dichotomy. We're the only party that wants to legislate neither personal morality nor economic equality. For examples of the above, see this collection of proposals we considered for the June 2008 voter guide's LP statement of purpose, and the version we adopted: http://libertarianmajority.net/lpca-voter-guide
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Platform Committee Proposes Draft
people's abortions, nor should any government or individual force a woman to have an abortion. The second is to remove the initial cult of the omnipotent sentence of the Statement of Principles, a move which LP founder David Nolan recommended as preferable to replacing it with the novel language that the committee had been considering. He said that at an early 1990's LP convention this change came within one vote of the required supermajority margin for passage. (As head of the Restore04 caucus, Nolan was also requested by the committee to submit a draft the 2004/2006 hybrid platform that the caucus has reportedly been working on.)No PlatCom member voted against recommending that the Denver delegates delete all 15 planks from the 2006 Platform. With a quorum varying between 13 and 15 members, only 6 of 30 recommendations attracted more than one nay for adoption, and only 3 of them more than two. The committee's current report and draft will be available at http://www.lpconvention.org/platform_committee.php. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 2/26/2008 10:27:00 PM
[marketliberal] RE: [LibertarianReformCaucus] The LP Rule POlice
Bonnie Scott wrote: DD) None of us got to be Libertarians by obeying all the rules just because they're so. (DD BH) Debra, you either believe in adhering to voluntary contracts, or you don't. (BH BS) This is a question of HOW to interpret the bylaws, not whether or not to follow them. (BS Context restored above. Debra even replied by saying: laws mean nothing to me , if they are just and true i follow them , if not i ignore them. if a rule is used to acheive a beneficial end then i may follow it , when i feel its irrelevant or justifying bad decisions then i ignore it. I don't think you want to associate yourself with the idea of following rules only when they're convenient. As I explained on TPW, the PlatCom majority in Vegas also followed rules that were extremely inconvenient for us. BS) By this same exact logic, the LNC alternates cannot substitute in case of absence of the primary member for their region. (BS It's not the same exact logic. The only mention of convention committee alternates -- the very sentence that creates them -- carries a clear description of their scope/purpose: Ranked alternates may be named by the appointing bodies to fill any vacancies in the Convention Committees. The sentence that creates LNC alternates says nothing about their scope/purpose: Any affiliate party with 10% or more of the total national party sustaining membership within affiliate parties (as determined for delegate allocation) shall be entitled to one National Committee representative and one alternate for each 10% of national sustaining membership. BS) The bylaws define procedures for vacancies for PlatComm and LNC. (BS The Bylaws define convention committee alternates with a scope/purpose that mentions the word vacancies. They do not do so for LNC alternates. BS) The bylaws do not define absences for PlatComm. (BS Are you suggesting that the authors of the Bylaws thought of absences and vacancies as synonyms for convention committee alternates? They are clearly distinguished in the convention rules regarding convention delegate alternates, and are also distinguished in RONR. BS) The bylaws only define mail-ballot absences for LNC, not face- to-face meeting absences. RONR p. 571, lines 24-35: If the bylaws authorize certain things specifically, other things of the same class are thereby prohibited. There is a presumption that nothing has been placed in the bylaws without some reason for it. LNC mail-ballot absences are even more of the same class as LNC face-to-face meeting absences than PlatComm vacancies are with PlatComm absences. (BS On the contrary, I see vacancies and absences are much more of the same class, as they both involve an empty chair, with the only difference being what we know about when/whether it will be filled again. By contrast, mail ballots involve licking stamps etc., and no chairs. Also, the discussion of mail ballots is quite removed from the generic sentence that creates LNC alternates, whereas the infinitive phrase to fill any vacancies in the Convention Committees directly modifies the ranked alternates may be named language. BS) LP Bylaw Article 8.1 would only cover classes of things not already covered in the bylaws, and the Policy Manual (where the LNC creates its own rules) cannot override the bylaws and RONR. (BS And in this case the Policy Manual doesn't. The office of LNC alternate is created by language that doesn't talk about either vacancies or absences, and so the LNC (being a board) is free to make its own rules about how alternates fill vacancies and absences. The language about mail ballots indeed forbids the LNC from making a rule e.g. to count alternates' ballots even when the region's representative votes. But in the case of vacancies and absences, the Bylaws are simply silent about LNC alternates. What I'm still waiting for anyone on your side of the debate to answer is: * What would be the difference if the infinitive phrase to fill any vacancies in the Convention Committees had never been added to the sentence creating convention committee alternates? * If filling in for absences is built into the notion of alternates, why do both the Convention Rules and LNC Policy Manual explicitly specify whether and how this may be done for delegate and LNC alternates?
[marketliberal] Cobb endorses suspension of interest payments on the federal debt?
Hi Joe, I write at http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/02/24/war-wins-in-california/ : Gene, all of Kubby's examples involved market-based responses to large-scale aggressors with a single return address -- e.g. corporations that sell tuna caught by killing dolphins. When I've asked him about air and water pollution problems that have no obvious return address, his answer has been pretty muddled. The best answer he's been able to come up with is that guys who drive polluting SUVs won't get laid, because Priuses will be more chic. Meanwhile, my view of Silicon Valley is blocked by smog every weekday morning. Geoanarchist economist Fred Foldvary has a much better answer: http://knowinghumans.net/2008/01/tax-bads-and-untax-goods-with-green-tax.htm l I just don't agree with Steve that it's optimally libertarian to give a green light (so to speak) to all aggression where the damage it causes is less than the cost to the victim of targeting, contesting, winning, and enforcing a tort claim against the aggressor. He calls pollution taxes the fox guarding the chicken coop, but his alternative is to declare open season on chickens. The idea that we should abolish state law enforcement because cops aren't perfect is a great for establishing one's radical credentials at the faculty club, but it's not very serious public policy. Kudos to George Phillies for standing up to global warming deniers and to Kubby's idea of effectively defaulting on the federal debt. Kubby claimed the idea of suspending payment of interest on the federal debt is supported by Reagan administration economist Joe Cobb, but I don't see that idea mentioned on Cobb's blog. I doubt Cobb would endorse that idea. I'm cc'ing this to him to see.
[marketliberal] RE: [CALPCandidates] Bulk Mail efficiency.
Bruce Cohen wrote: BC) This was one of my suggestions leading up to the Chair's race in 2007. (BC I don't remember any of the Chair candidates circulating any written proposals for what they would do as Chair. If you can point to one on any of the various LPCA-related forums, that would be helpful. I circulated almost two dozen questions at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cal-libs/message/1419 on the Tuesday before the convention, and no candidate besides me answered them.
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Root Wins LPCA Straw Poll
The LPCA Convention today held an open instant-runoff straw poll after hearing Burns, Kubby, Jingozian, Phillies and Root debate. The counts of first-preference results were: - 20 Wayne Root - 12 Steve Kubby - 12 Ron Paul - 8 George Phillies - 3 Jim Burns - 2 Christine Smith - 2 Mary Ruwart - 2 Karen Kwiatkowski - 1 Michael Jingozian - 1 NOTAAfter the IRV process, the results were - 31 Root - 21 KubbyAll of the anonymous ballots will be made public.Smith's victory in the Super Tuesday primary seemed to have been anomolous, perhaps explicable by her being the only woman in a very crowded field. By winning convincingly in Kubby's home state, Root has established himself as the front-runner in the campaign. I would now rate the odds of nomination as - 50% Root - 35% Kubby - 10% Phillies - 5% Others -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 2/24/2008 05:23:00 PM
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] More LPCA Convention Results
For our region's LNC Representatives (top two win): - 34 Mark Hinkle - 33 M Carling - 28 Power - 17 Starchild For our region's LNC Alternates (top two win): - 44 Scott Lieberman - 38 Dan Wiener - 27 Starchild For the open seats on the LPCA Executive Committee (top five win): - 62 Matthew Barnes - 59 Jesse Thomas - 49 T.J. Campbell - 46 Rob Power - 39 Eric Bressen - 37 Mark Selzer - 29 Starchild Elected as ExCom alternates were Donna Orlando and Mark Selzer. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 2/24/2008 05:55:00 PM
[marketliberal] RE: [ca-liberty] LP PRESIDENT LACK OF DEBATE!
Bruce wrote to Starchild: BC) So, did you vote for or against the current LPCA policy of charging delegates? Please name the motion and your vote. I have been told that you voted YES. I hope this is untrue. (BC Your wish has come true, because not only has there not been any such vote during the current LPCA ExCom, but Starchild isn't even a member of the ExCom. I hope Ms. Smith is able to come to the San Diego debate this weekend. I also hopes she takes advantage of the opportunity to supply answers and comments for a candidate survey that I'll be distributing to each of the delegates in San Diego. Kubby, Jingozian, and Burns have already answered it, and the Phillies campaign apparently will be answering it. A copy of the survey is at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CALibs/message/1283
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Either the LP Follows Its Own Rules, Or Not
LP Bylaw Article 1: These articles shall govern the association known as the Libertarian Party, hereinafter referred to as the Party. LP Bylaw Article 13: The rules contained in the current edition of Robert's Rules of Order, Newly Revised shall govern the Party in all cases to which they are applicable and in which they are not inconsistent with other rules adopted by the Party. LP Bylaw Article 11.7.4: Ranked alternates may be named by the appointing bodies to fill any vacancies in the Convention Committees. Convention Rule 2.3: Duly selected alternates may be freely substituted for any members of their delegation who are temporarily or permanently absent from the floor, provided the procedure has been clearly specified by the affiliate party in advance of the Convention, and the Secretary has been provided with lists of the affiliate party's delegates and alternates as well as a copy of the affiliate party's rules governing substitutions.RONR p. 571, lines 24-35: If the bylaws authorize certain things specifically, other things of the same class are thereby prohibited. There is a presumption that nothing has been placed in the bylaws without some reason for it. There can be no valid reason for authorizing certain things to be done that can clearly be done without the authorization of the bylaws, unless the intent is to specify the things of the same class that may be done, all others being prohibited.RONR p. 17, lines 4-18: In some organizations a particular practice may sometimes come to be followed as a matter of established custom so that it is treated practically as if it were prescribed by a rule of order. However, if such a practice is or becomes in conflict with the parliamentary authority or any written rule of the organization, and a Point of Order citing the conflict is raised at any time, the custom falls to the ground, and the conflicting provision in the parliamentary authority or written rule must thereafter be complied with, unless a special rule of order (or, in appropriate circumstances, a standing rule) is added or amended to incorporate the custom. If there is no contrary provision in the parliamentary authority or written rules, the established custom should be adhered to unless the assembly, by a majority vote, agrees to do otherwise. RONR, p. 483, lines 23-28: Committees of organized societies operate under any applicable rules stated in the bylaws, the special rules of order, the parliamentary authority, and standing rules adopted by the society. Committees may not adopt their own rules except as authorized in the bylaws or in instructions given to the committee by the society. RONR, p. 469, lines 11-16: In an organized society the board operates under the bylaws, the parliamentary authority, and any applicable special rules of order or standing rules of the society, except as the bylaws may authorize the board to adopt its own rules.Bylaw Article 8.1: The National Committee shall adopt rules of procedure for the conduct of its meetings and the carrying out of its duties and responsibilities.LNC Policy Manual (Aug 2005) I.2.D: Free substitution of Alternates for Regional Representatives at LNC meetings is permitted.Either the Party of Principle follows the rules it has voluntarily adopted, or it doesn't. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 2/22/2008 05:33:00 PM
[marketliberal] RE: [lpsf-discuss] A just revolution theory
Starchild wrote: SC) A government which fails on a systemic basis to respect individual rights and instead habitually rules by initiation of force is illegitimate, therefore any individual or group of individuals whose aim is to replace its rule with something significantly more libertarian have the right to subvert or overthrow it by any means generally consistent with such an aim. (SC I wouldn't agree that all states are by definition always subject to just revolution. I say by definition because I agree with Roy Childs that zero-aggression absolutism implies anarchism: http://libertarianmajority.net/does-zero-aggression-absolutism-imply-anarchi sm I prefer the Jeffersonian language about revolution used in http://ecolibertarian.org/manifesto However, I prefer your language to the individual-secession language from the 2004 platform, about which I'm surveying our presidential candidates: http://libertarianmajority.net/local--files/start/POTUSPlatformSurvey.pdf A few days ago in Vegas we on the Platform Committee proposed a restored secession plank called Self-Determination: http://libertarianmajority.net/pure-principles-platform This morning I discussed the PlatCom's draft on Steve Kubby's show: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/SteveKubbyShow/blog/2008/02/20/Leading-from-the -Front-Lines
[marketliberal] unofficial copy of current PlatCom platform draft
As far as I can tell from having gone through my notes twice, http://libertarianmajority.net/pure-principles-platform this is how the LP Platform would look if all and only the changes currently recommended by the Platform Committee were applied to it. Those recommendations were adopted by PlatCom in its Feb 15-16 meeting in Las Vegas. I was elected Secretary, but it probably will be next week at the earliest before we have officially-approved minutes and a resulting Report. However, my notes show that no PlatCom member voted against recommending that the Denver delegates delete all 15 planks from the 2006 Platform. With a quorum varying between 13 and 15 members, only 6 of 30 recommendations attracted more than one nay for adoption, and only 3 of them more than two. The PlatCom adjourned at the call of the Chair, and is likely to next meet Thursday May 22 in Denver. Comments to mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] or at http://lpplatform.blogspot.com/ http://lpplatform.blogspot.com/ are encouraged. The PlatCom expects to consider a forthcoming draft from the Restoration Caucus, as well as proposals to amend at least planks 2.2 and 2.3. Here are my unofficial counts of nays for the Committee's current recommendations to adopt or amend planks. N,N means we have a separate recommendation to amend the plank being proposed for adoption. My impression was that Labor Markets got 5 nays because there was lingering disagreement after a substitution amendment replaced 1972 language with slightly different 2004 language. I suspect that Money and Financial Markets got 3 nays (both on the plank and the amendment) in protest of not including language to abolish the Fed. Statement of Principles 1 1.0. Personal Liberty 1 1.1. Expression and Communication 1 1.2. Personal Privacy 1 1.3. Personal Relationships 0,0 1.4. Abortion 2 1.5. Crime and Justice 0 1.6. Self-Defense 0 2.0. Economic Liberty 0 2.1. Property and Contract 0 2.2. The Environment 0 2.3. Energy and Resources 0 2.4. Government Finance and Spending 1 2.5. Money and Financial Markets 3,3 2.6. Monopolies and Corporations 1 2.7. Labor Markets 5 2.8. Education 2 2.9. Health Care 0 2.10. Retirement and Income Security 0 3.0. Securing Liberty 0 3.1. National Defense 0 3.2. Internal Security and Individual Rights 1 3.3. International Affairs 0 3.4. Free Trade and Migration 1? 3.5. Rights and Discrimination 0 3.6. Representative Government 0 3.7. Self-Determination 2 4.0. Omissions 0
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] CA: 1. Smith 2. Kubby 3. Root
Christine Smith easily outpaced the crowded LP field in today's non-binding LP primary, taking 26% to Kubby's 17%, Root's 15%, and Phillies' ~7th-place 4.9%. Turnout was on a pace of 50% of 2004 levels, though absentee ballots might change that somewhat. I'm astonished at Phillies' result, which was only a little bit above what might have been a noise-induced minimum vote for the five trailing candidates. In San Francisco county, home of the Outright Libertarians who had endorsed him, Phillies had only 20 votes (6.6%) with 450 of 580 precincts reporting. Kubby, whom Outright leader Rob Power had dismissed as having withdrawn from the race by endorsing Ron Paul, stood at 57 votes (18.7%) there. Smith and Phillies had both missed the April LPCA convention, so speaking in front of the hundred or so delegates had little correlation with the election results. I don't buy Tom Knapp's theory that Smith was helped by having the same name as a Playboy playmate, but pictures like the one at upper right couldn't have hurt her cause with the heavily male and web-dwelling LP electorate. If her evident passion for liberty can overcome her suspiciousness of moderate Libertarians, her energy and enthusiasm could sweep her into the nomination, or at least secure her the V.P. spot and an inside track for a future bid.Smith has to now be considered a top-tier contender for the nomination, and the Phillies campaign needs to be able to explain its poor performance. I have to revise my nomination odds to Kubby 30% Smith 30% Root 20% Phillies 10% Hess 5% Jackson 2% Paul 2% Other 1%.California: 24.8% ( 5739 of 23109 ) precincts Christine Smith (Lib)1,975 25.9 % Steve Kubby (Lib)1,333 17.5 % Wayne A. Root (Lib)1,114 14.6 % Bob Jackson (Lib)615 8.1 % Michael P. Jingozian (Lib)387 5.1 % Barry Hess (Lib)388 5.1 % George Phillies (Lib)379 4.9 % Daniel Imperato (Lib)313 4.0 % Robert Milnes (Lib)303 3.9 % John Finan (Lib)299 3.9 % Dave Hollist (Lib)297 3.8 % Alden Link (Lib)247 3.2 % Missouri went 1) Root 2) Kubby 3) Phillies. Don't think that the 47% for uncommitted was a Ron Paul vote, because uncommitted took 39% in 2004 (Nolan 45% Perez 9% Diket 8%). I don't know why Smith wasn't on the ballot in Missouri.Missouri: 3357 of 3371 precincts Uncommitted 961 46.8% Root 372 18.1% Kubby 197 9.6% Phillies 164 8.0% Hollist 141 6.9% Imperato 139 6.8% Jingozian 79 3.8% The Arizona LP held an online instant-runoff non-binding primary, and tonight their site says merely that the results were: 1. Phillies 2. Root 3. Hess -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 2/06/2008 12:20:00 AM
[marketliberal] RE: [ca-liberty] Outright are believers in free dialogue?
Brian Miller wrote: BM) I don't normally indulge your content-free trolling (BM I quote claims and rebut them with facts. You spew vague and undefended distortions. In December I posted (at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2456) an offer of $1000 for the Outright Libertarians if you can back up your claim that Ron Paul declares he isn't a libertarian by quoting him saying that (outside of the context of party membership, of course). My cash remains unclaimed, and that message gives half a dozen other quotes from you about Ron Paul that remain utterly unsubstantiated and thus content-free. BM) your apparently complete disconnect with the Libertarian Party's mainstream (as evidenced by your clumsy platform posturing and more recently, by the Tuesday presidential preference primaries for the LP). (BM Clumsy platform posturing? Thanks for so quickly exhibiting the irony lacing your comment about content-free. As for complete disconnect, I'm not the one whose endorsed candidate garnered a shocking 6th-place finish with only 5% of the LPCA vote -- including an anemic 22 votes in the Outrights' own San Francisco county. By contrast, the top 3 vote-getters are all Ron Paul fans, and together pulled in over 53% of the vote. BM) Firstly, let me say that I'm not quite sure how a broken link, a link to a discussion group that neither I (nor any other Outright Ex-Com member, to my knowledge) participates in, a link referring to the LRC's push-poll on our platform, and various other irrelevant content links have any direct correlation to my original post. (BM The link was not broken on cal-libs, and was merely folded by ca-liberty's antediluvian ascii-only policy. A shorter version of it is: http://tinyurl.com/3482py. It's understandable that you didn't want to follow the link, since it documents what Outright moderators actually think about free dialogue. The second link is to a message that also appeared on the Outright group and lpsf-discuss. It's still available at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OutrightLibertarians/message/3120. It contains unrebutted documentation of you lying about Reform Caucus draft platforms, and my daring to cite it got me banned from the Outright list. The third link was directly in response to your content-free complaint about misleading 'surveys'. It's hilarious how you can so brazenly claim that a link full of facts about the Platform survey has no direct correlation to your post commenting on the survey. In that link, http://knowinghumans.net/2008/02/platform-survey-rebukes-silence-and.html, I document how (contrary to content-free radical talking points) the survey results rebuked not only the radicals' preference for a detailed destinational Platform, but also even-handedly rebuked the short top-N-issues platform previously advocated by many reformers. My posting shows how I accurately predicted the responses received from over 2000 LP members, and that my only mistake was in overestimating the support for a top-N-issues platform (as opposed to PlatCom's current approach of pure directional principles with little implementation detail). http://tinyurl.com/3746wn is my takedown of your latest puerile daddy knows best mantra. The money shot was: your casual dismissal of the multi-year efforts of a couple dozen PlatCom members and Caucus leaders as 'Brian knows best' is pitch-perfect irony. BM) Certainly, individuals such as yourself who have launched into direct personal attacks on other members on the Outright list will be moderated (BM I'm not the one who exhibited bigotry by disparaging someone for their demographics (a straight white guy in suburbia), or who made a crude implicit reference to somebody's spouse (how to pleasure a woman). All I did was supply unrebutted documentation of your willfully false statements. It turns out that for the Outright moderators, facts that are inconvenient can be censored if you just label them a personal attack. BM) Bruce Cohen exercises a similar policy on this list. (BM Cohen banned Dondero for spewing a shocking stream of obscenities. This comparison is laughable. BM) the Republican you were throwing so much weight behind posted truly dismal numbers (BM I never made any claim that Paul was going to change the outcome of the GOP nomination race. The fact remains that he garnered unprecedented amounts of votes, donations, and activism. The question is: from what parts of Nolan space do his supporters hail? I suspect they are almost evenly distributed across the four quadrants. But even if you cut his numbers by 75%, it's still an unprecedented tsunami in the freedom movement. BM) In all three Libertarian primaries held on Tuesday, the putative winners have been pro-LGBT candidates (BM You might as well say that the winners of the LP primaries have all been pro-freedom. However, of all the LP contenders rated by Outright, the only one slightly dinged on your scorecard (Root) came in either
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Spinning the LP Primary Results
In the wake of the LP's Super Tuesday, earnest LP partisans promptly started spinning the results, just like major-party politicos do.In the comments at Third Party Watch, Tom Knapp spins the Super Tuesday outcome by saying it leaves us with a two-man race between his man Steve Kubby and (not surprisingly) the top-tier candidate least likely to draw votes from self-described radical Kubby -- Wayne Root. Kubby explains away Root's 1st-place finish in Missouri (doubling Kubby's total) as a predictable result of ballot position (that Knapp apparently didn't predict). He explains away Christine Smith's 50% margin over Kubby in California as due to Smith's gender and sharing a name with a Playboy playmate -- again, neither a last-minute tactic of Smith's. He spars with George Phillies in the comments over how hard Phillies campaigned in California, and how Kubby didn't even really try. Knapp sharply criticized Kubby rivals Smith, Phillies, and Root in a blog posting yesterday (which two Outright Libertarian leaders promptly protested while ironically asserting their dedication to fair play and free dialogue). He claims to believe that Smith is not a threat, but draw your own conclusions when he increases his attacks on her. Wayne Root booster Bruce Cohen says Root scored a gold, silver, and bronze in yesterday's contests, without without campaigning a single day in either Arizona, Missouri or California. (Knapp pointed out that Root spoke at the 2007 LPCA convention.) Phillies downplayed his own efforts, and Knapp downplayed Kubby's efforts, so maybe Libertarians should ask if anyone even wants the nomination? One who apparently does is Smith, whose blog gave a spin-free report on her California victory, with no excuses offered about why she wasn't on the ballot in Missouri or Arizona -- and no mention of them either. Phillies' web site today simply links to the outcomes in the three states (noting his win in Arizona), while Kubby's site hasn't been updated. The Outright Libertarians leadership is trying to spin the LP primaries as a victory of gay-friendly candidates over allegedly gay-disrespecting candidates They point out the astonishing fact that the first tier of serious candidates who took the Outright survey were winners over the perennial/vanity/not-so-serious candidates who didn't take their survey. They crow that the first-tier candidates all turn out to be in favor of gay rights (amazing!), and say that what's characteristic of the 2nd-tier candidates is that they refused to take the Outright survey and thus don't respect the LGBT community. (Back when some of the 2nd-tier candidates didn't have web sites, I guess they were refusing to have them and thus don't respect the web.) The Outright posting also claims that Super Tuesday is a defeat for Libertarians who support Ron Paul. However, in the only two races for which we have data, pro-Ron-Paul candidates (Kubby, Smith, Root) out-polled the anti-Ron-Paul Outright-endorsed candidate (Phillies) by 3-1 in Missouri, and 10-1 in California (and 8-1 in San Francisco). Furthermore, (gay Ron Paul supporter) Eric Garris says at Third Party Watch that write-in votes outpolled Smith in the biggest California counties by a 3-1 or 4-1 margin. I wonder what name was on those write-ins? I bet the initials were R.P., and no I don't mean Rob Power. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 2/06/2008 03:37:00 PM
[marketliberal] RE: [LPplatform-discuss] Platform Survey Rebukes Silence and Length
Kevin Bjornson wrote: KB) That a majority of likely delegates favor silence on schisms is a major breakthrough (KB Unfortunately, due to the phrasing of the question, we don't actually know that. All we know is that with a forced choice between silence and compromise language acknowledg[ing] there is more than one acceptable position, half chose silence. It could just be that those people reject the idea that there can ever be more than one acceptable position. And it could just be that the other half of the respondents favor minor variants in our position over silence. Again, we just don't really learn anything useful from this question. KB) Brian realizes that absolute non-interventionism would be disastrous. Since he also believes that non-interventionism is a libertarian principle (KB That's not what I believe. The best way to state what I believe is to quote me. It's not like I don't write a lot, so it shouldn't be hard to quote me on whatever topic interests you. :-)
RE: [marketliberal] Re: [DFC] Third Parties 96 declaration
Yes, that's a ding on Phillies. I completely disagree with him on enforcing nanny-statist minimum wage laws against our trading partners, and only agree with the idea of environmental tarrifs to the extent that they punish environmental damage that is caused by the actual importing (e.g. if the products contain CFCs), or that somehow crosses the Pacific from China to here as a result of the production process (e.g. perhaps greenhouse gases). By the same token, disallowing the latter kind of aggression-policing is a ding on Kubby.
[marketliberal] Outright are believers in free dialogue?
Brian Miller wrote: BM) In contrast, Outright has accepted both positive and negative commentary on our blog about *every* issue we've ever taken a position on -- including the Phillies endorsement -- since we're believers in free dialogue. (BM http://libertarianintelligence.com/2008/01/outright-libertarians-endorse-phi llies.html BM) We've been seeing far too much dishonest editing, out-and-out lying (BM http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2249 BM) misleading surveys, (BM http://knowinghumans.net/2008/02/platform-survey-rebukes-silence-and.html BM) daddy-knows-best leadership from certain quarters of the party, etc. (BM http://tinyurl.com/3746wn
RE: [marketliberal] Re: [DFC] Third Parties 96 declaration
Tom Knapp wrote: TK) I'd be interested in where you think you find Kubby disallowing any kind of aggression policing. (TK You know Kubby told me on his webradio show that he opposes pollution taxes. Do you really have the free time available not to just skip straight to the part where you disagree that pollution taxes are a form of aggression policing? I sure don't.
[marketliberal] Third Parties 96 declaration
Paul Gagnon (Democratic Freedom Caucus Virginia Vice-Chair) wrote: PG) In 1996, I mediated an alliance at George Washington University in D.C. called Third Parties 96 involving the Greens, LP, Patriot Party, DSA, et al. We started out with the intention of only getting agreement on ballot access issues, electoral procedure, etc. We ended up with a huge statement of areas of agreement. [...] The LPers took it to the Watergate LP and they didnt know what to do with it. (PG The unanimously-agreed-to 17 statements sound pretty harmless, although I'm curious what the LP contingent thought they meant by We support the maximum empowerment of people in their communities, consistent with fairness, social responsibility and human rights, to meet local needs, and to defend those communities against exploitive forces. I've placed a copy of the declaration at http://libertarianmajority.net/tp96-common-ground-declaration-redacted, where I've stricken through the parts I think Libertarians would balk at. A while back I gave a similar treatment to the DFC Platform, which I've reposted at http://libertarianmajority.net/democratic-freedom-caucus-redacted-platform. It is eerily similar to the Pure Principles http://libertarianmajority.net/pure-principles-platform Platform that the 2008 LP PlatCom is currently drafting. In fact, with the tweaks/deletions of the indicated 7 sentences and two sections (Free Trade With Free Countries and Social Responsibility), it would in my judgment be better than any past LP Platform. I especially admire the DFC Platform's treatment of land value taxation, and hope that we geolibertarians in the LP get more organized and work to make our Platform tolerate LVT and the green http://knowinghumans.net/2008/01/tax-bads-and-untax-goods-with-green-tax.ht ml tax shift. Ultimately, I'd like to see all of us move toward statements like those in this draft EcoLibertarian http://ecolibertarian.org/manifesto Manifesto. I wonder if DFC members would disagree with any of its 33 tenets. Brian Holtz 2006-2008 LP Platform Committee
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Anarchist Questions Freedom Train Metaphor
Autodidact anarchist Charles Johnson (Rad Geek) posted an essay Jan 25 criticizing anarchists who subscribe to former LP Chair Steve Dasbach's Freedom Train metaphor:Avoiding points of conflict between anarchists and minarchists means either studied silence or mumbling prevarication on issues that ought to be absolutely central for any anarchist worth her salt — among other things, the right of (state, local, neighborhood, individual) secession, the moral illegitimacy and practical futility of appeals to the Constitution, the arrogance and abusiveness of monopoly police forces, the illegitimacy of any and all forms of taxation [...] [W]hat will happen on this ride is that once the train pulls into the minarchy station, the minarchists will get off the train — and then they will try to block the tracks and threaten to open fire on the rest of us if we try to take the train any further towards the end of the line. That’s what being a minarchist means: government always comes out of the barrel of a gun, and that’s true whether the government is unlimited or limited, maximal or minimal. If you try to move, in any concrete way, from minarchy towards anarchy, those minarchists you spent so many years working with are still going to try to shoot you. Personally, I have no desire to join any movement whose members will turn around and shoot me in the end.Johnson is almost right, except we minarchists will only shoot him if he commits aggression or takes up arms against a sea of minarchist troubles and by opposing tries to end them.Starchild adds a comment there counseling libertarian anarchists not to hyphenate themselves and thus implicitly concede that straight anarchism isn't necessarily libertarian. (Starchild claims not to be an anarchist himself, but the only force initiation I've ever gotten him to endorse has to do with forcing alleged aggressors to stand trial.) -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 1/30/2008 08:42:00 PM
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Endorsements by Cobb, Ruprecht, Rohrabacher
Joe Cobb is a libertarian economist from the University of Chicago who worked for the Reagan White House and a couple of Republican congressional committees. He is signing onto the Steve Kubby campaign as chief economic advisor, and advises Kubby to announce that as President he would stop collecting the income tax.Dave Ruprecht is a TV personality and the former Executive Director of the LPCA. Third Party Watch reported on Jan 7 that Ruprecht is endorsing Wayne Allyn Root for President.California Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher is a former libertarian radical and one of the most consistently libertarian-leaning congressmen. He endorsed Mitt Romney on Jan 22.California state senator Tom McClintock is a favorite of many LPCA members. With Fred Thompson out of the race, he is leaning toward supporting Ron Paul. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 1/30/2008 09:10:00 PM
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] PlatCom Evicted From Vegas Meeting Space
The Platform and Bylaws Committees had been scheduled to meet on Friday Feb 15 in Las Vegas in rooms arranged by the Libertarian State Leadership Alliance in conjunction with its Saturday conference -- whose bloc of hotel rooms are already sold out. Nevada LP Chair and conference organizer Jim Duensing says he was promised that the committees would not meet on that Saturday during the LSLA events, but the most anybody else seems to remember is that the lack of available space made the issue moot. Duensing could find nobody who remembered the commitment he says was made, and cited no authority by which anybody could have bound the PlatCom in the first place.The PlatCom has been worried that it won't be able to finish its work in one day, since it will be debating and voting on - at least 25 planks from the Pure Principles Platform draft - separate recommendations to delete the remaining 15 legacy 2006 planks - 9 different platform-related Bylaws Committee proposals(If instead of recommending the 3P draft the PlatCom tried to restore the 40 planks deleted in Portland, that would be just as many separate recommendations to debate and vote on.) Space was available on that Sunday, but several PlatCom members wouldn't be in town that long, and a quorum might not be available. PlatCom Chair Alicia Mattson found some Saturday meeting space independent of the LSLA conference and reserved it using pledged donations from several PlatCom members. Duensing reacted by threatening to take away the PlatCom's Friday meeting space unless the committee voted to promise not to meet Saturday. I proposed the following motion:A Motion expressing the sense of the Platform Committee: The Platform Committee intends to meet in Las Vegas on Friday Feb 15. We will endeavor to finish our weekend's work that day, or at least finish enough of it to be confident that the rest can be finished given the likelihood of a quorum and available space on Sunday Feb 17. However, if at the end of that Friday we don't have that confidence, then we may decide to meet on Saturday Feb 16 for just long enough to ensure that we will by the end of that Sunday have completed the work for which so many of us are enduring considerable expense and inconvenience. We will do our best to make sure that our meeting does not conflict with the 2pm - 6pm LSLA Platform Debates, and indeed hope to be finished with our weekend's work by then so that it can be discussed there. We have no desire to draw attendees away from LSLA events on Saturday, and indeed many of us hope to attend as many of the events as we can. If the LSLA organizer is unwilling to guarantee us the space that had been arranged for us on that Friday and Sunday, then our current Chair should do whatever is reasonable and prudent to ensure we will have space available for all these dates.Duensing indicated that this would not avert his threat, and in any event only a handful of PlatCom members dignified this manufactured crisis by bothering to vote on the motion (all of them in favor). Thus, with the PlatCom having taken no action whatsoever, Duensing followed through on his threat and announced: The Platform Committee has turned down the LSLA's room offer. No member or alternate of the PlatCom defended Duensing's decision. He will now be using the room to carry out the important LP work of screening 9/11 conspiracy movies. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 1/30/2008 10:24:00 PM
[marketliberal] RE: Future Libertarian platform weaker than (Republican) Paul's plan?
Paul's plan is weaker by far. His plan would cut a few taxes that constitute a small fraction of federal revenue, and doesn't mention eliminating the income tax (which would make his plan require either massive borrowing or touching the third rail of entitlements). Our Pure Principles Platform eliminates the entire income tax. His plan would cut some military bases and freeze discretionary spending while giving entitlement spending a free pass. Our Pure Principles Platform calls for the abolishment of all federal programs and services not required under the U.S. Constitution, and for getting the government out of the entitlement business (education, healthcare, retirement, and income security) altogether. His plan would make the Fed a little more transparent and legalize private gold or silver currency. Our Pure Principles Platform goes further, saying individuals may use any commodity they want as currency, and that there should be unrestricted competition among banks and depository institutions of all types. His plan would repeal or reform (how can it do both?) Sarbanes/Oxley, and ease regulatory burdens on community financial institutions. Our Pure Principles Platform calls flatly for the abolition of all regulation of financial and capital markets (i.e. aside from force or fraud). For more about Ron Paul's non-radical positions, see http://knowinghumans.net/2007/12/teflon-libertarian-moderate.html . For the recent Paul backsliding that even this non-radical found embarrassing, see http://libertarianintelligence.com/2007/12/ron-paul-backslides-on-meet-press .html .
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] LPNC Condemns LNC Invite To Ron Paul
Stephen Gordon slices and dices the North Carolina LP's resolution condemning the LNC's invitation that Ron Paul seek the LP nomination. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 1/23/2008 11:20:00 PM
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Ron Paul Still Rejecting Third Party Bid
Eric Dondero spots a Texas newspaper article quoting Ron Paul:If he would run as a third-party candidate, he said, he likely would do it as an independent rather than as a Libertarian. “There’s too many people we’ve brought together,” Paul said of his many kinds of supporters. “I have a lot of Democrats who express interest in what I’m doing,” with foreign policy.Stephen Gordon quotes Paul on the radio show of somebody named Glenn Beck: GLENN: Will you run as a third candidate if you done get the nomination? PAUL: No, I don’t want to do that. I have no plans of doing that. This is a tough enough job right now. GLENN: Really? Well, why is that? You don’t think — I mean, if it was McCain and Clinton, you don’t think there would be a lot of people going, well, jeez, I can’t vote for either of them? PAUL: I think it’s the system that bothers me the most. You know, the job of getting on the ballot, I probably spend millions of dollars and half of my effort just wondering if I could even get on the ballot. Then the debates wouldn’t be available to me and you probably wouldn’t have me on your program or something. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 1/23/2008 11:46:00 PM
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Roderick Long's Anarchy Petition
Prof. Roderick Long has started a Petition to Abolish the Government of the USA. That is, he's petitioning to abolish surely the only government in human history that is explicitly founded on the natural right of rebellion against unjust government, and that enshrines the right to circulate such a petition -- rather than welcoming such a petition as an easy way to identify state enemies. Kudos to Long for braving the obvious rejoinders about irony, and taking a clear stand against the institution of American government, whose founding and founders are so often lionized by hypocritical anti-statist libertarian radicals.Tom Knapp is signatory #2, but I doubt we'll be seeing self-described constitutionalist (yet plumbline radical) Steve Kubby sign.As cute as this petition is, even cuter is how the first commenter on Long's blog posting thinks it's only a matter of time before the government shuts down the petition. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 1/23/2008 07:00:00 AM
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Conflict Inside Paul Campaign Over Newsletters
Reason quotes Ron Paul's longtime congressional chief of staff Tom Lizardo:Last week, a statement was prepared by Ron Paul's press secretary Jesse Benton, and approved by Ron Paul, acknowledging Lew Rockwell as having a role in the newsletters. The statement was squashed by campaign chairman Kent Snyder.We already knew that Rockwell (like Paul) had a role in the newsletters, so the news here is the open warfare within the Paul camp. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 1/17/2008 11:01:00 PM
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Reason Connects NewsletterGate Dots
Reason today does the most comprehensive job yet of connecting the dots in the Ron Paul newsletter scandal. (The article is up-front about how much the paleolibertarians around Chief Suspect Lew Rockwell despise the cosmopolitan libertarians of Reason and the Cato Institute, and the feeling is evidently mutual.) The most interesting parts of the article cite quotes from Rockwell that make it highly believable that he could have written or at least encouraged the newsletters' bigotry. Excerpts:During the period when the most incendiary items appeared—roughly 1989 to 1994—Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist paleoconservatives, producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic. [...][In 1996,] Paul defended the statements that appeared under his name, claiming that they expressed his philosophical differences with Democrats and had been taken out of context. He finally disavowed them in a 2001 interview with Texas Monthly, explaining that his campaign staff had convinced him at the time that it would be too confusing to attribute them to a ghostwriter. [...] The publishing operation was lucrative. A tax document from June 1993—wrapping up the year in which the Political Report had published the welfare checks comment on the L.A. riots—reported an annual income of $940,000 for Ron Paul Associates, listing four employees in Texas (Paul's family and Rockwell) and seven more employees around the country. If Paul didn't know who was writing his newsletters, he knew they were a crucial source of income and a successful tool for building his fundraising base for a political comeback. The tenor of Paul's newsletters changed over the years. The ones published between Paul's return to private life after three full terms in congress (1985) and his Libertarian presidential bid (1988) notably lack inflammatory racial or anti-gay comments. The letters published between Paul's first run for president and his return to Congress in 1996 are another story [...]Cato Institute President Ed Crane told reason he recalls a conversation from some time in the late 1980s in which Paul claimed that his best source of congressional campaign donations was the mailing list for The Spotlight, the conspiracy-mongering, anti-Semitic tabloid run by the Holocaust denier Willis Carto until it folded in 2001. [...]To grow, the movement had to embrace older conservative values. State-enforced segregation, Rockwell wrote, was wrong, but so is State-enforced integration. State-enforced segregation was not wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate with members of one's own race, nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse. The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report, titled Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement. Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion leaders were too invested in the status quo to be brought around to a libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an Outreach to the Rednecks, which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an unholy alliance of 'corporate liberal' Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America. [...] We have a dream, Rockwell wrote in that same January 1992 edition of RRR, and perhaps someday it will come to pass. (Hell, if 'Dr.' King can have a dream, why can't we?) Our dream is that, one day, we Buchananites can present Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the liberal and conservative and centrist elites, with a dramatic choiceWe can say: 'Look, gang: you have a choice, it's either Pat Buchanan or David Duke.' [...] -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 1/16/2008 08:11:00 AM
[marketliberal] Re: [Libertarian Intelligence] New Ron Paul Quotes At TNR Are Tame
Thomas L. Knapp wrote: TK) the only real explanation I can come up with for your not as bad conclusion is there's enough not as bad stuff among the material I haven't seen yet to trigger your net reduction fetish or something. (TK Not as bad was about the extrema, not the sum, so you're swinging at your phantoms rather than my fetish. The subscription info you cited was in the context of an article that resoundingly condemned the racism of some Abraham Lincoln quotes (and of David Duke for good measure). The info read like merely a courtesy nod for citing the article. Nothing I saw quoted in the new batch comes close to the bigotry of these earlier lines: * limp wrist * bring back the closet * Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks
[marketliberal] RE: Open debates victory!
Edward Teyssier wrote: ET) [Shopping malls are] owned by the developers who got their land USUALLY (admittedly not always) by eminent domain. In other words, the local municipality or county board of supervisors stole the underlying land from its rightful owner (ET Whether a given shopping mall is built on such stolen land is an empirical fact that of course can change the relevant moral calculus. Starchild's point, however, was that the mere scale of operation of the mall means that its rightful owner loses some of his rights because his operation is so big. And that's wrong. Brian Holtz http://LibertarianIntelligence.com http://libertarianintelligence.com/ Signal Intelligence About The LP
[marketliberal] to Hogarth on TPW
Susan, maybe you should debate Restore04 leader David Nolan instead of me, because he wrote the Pledge you just quoted, and he says it doesn't commit LP members to your absolutist view that it's more important to abstain from force-initiation than it is to minimize it. For details, see http://libertarianmajority.net/does-the-pledge-mandate-zero-aggression-absol utism. And if instead you think it's the SoP that specifies your pinched definition of what it means to be a Libertarian, see http://libertarianmajority.net/does-the-sop-mandate-zero-agression-absolutis m. It's nice that -- on a forum you can't censor -- you say you do understand that different ways of understanding aggression can lead to different ways of thinking about libertarianism. Does that mean you no longer think it's an abomination for e.g. geoanarchist theorist (and LP member) Prof. Fred Foldvary to advocate taxes on pollution and congestion and land value as a replacement for all taxes on income (wages, interest, dividends, profits, gifts, and inheritance), production (including value added), transactions (e.g. the sale, import, or export of goods and services), and wealth (e.g. real estate improvements, capital, or other assets)? At http://knowinghumans.net/2008/01/tax-bads-and-untax-goods-with-green-tax.htm l he explains how his position derives from the geolibertarian interpretation of aggression. Do you or do you not think that the LP Platform should rule out that interpretation? (You can add this to your debate with David Nolan, since he agrees with Foldvary and Milton Friedman and me that a land value tax is the least bad kind of tax.) Sean, I agree with Susan that the idea of caucuses isn't necessarily divisive. The key question is whether a caucus is working toward ecumenicalism across the major schools of libertarianism, versus trying to have one minority school endorsed as the most pure or principled. I think it's healthy for Susan and I to each argue that our favorite school of libertarianism is more pure and principled than the rest. What's unhealthy is for one of us to argue that the party's fundamental documents -- and membership oath! -- should declare that one school is best. And again, I agree with Susan that the mission statement is too narrow, and that the LNC should be less timid about passing policy resolutions, as long as they clearly are within the bounds of whatever Platform, Program, and resolutions the delegates approved at the most recent NatCon. Chuck, I remain full of awe and admiration of how you can so skillfully navigate the stormy (but ultimately narrow) waters separating the radicals and reformers. Despite your criticism that the Pure Principles draft is as flawed by extremism as the 2004 Platform, you give me hope for the future of the LP. I had you in mind when I said in the debate: some of us are anarchists who believe that growing the LP only creates future anarchists, and that shrinking the government only creates stronger evidence for anarchism. If only all LP radicals had your intellectual confidence in the power of radical ideology to set fire to all minds who flutter closer to its flame, then we'd have damn little to debate about here.
[marketliberal] TPW comment
Posted at http://thirdpartywatch.com/2008/01/12/libertarian-radicals-and-reformers-deb ate/: Tom Blanton, regarding my obsession with Rothbard: sorry, but you'll have to run away from Rothbard far faster than that to disassociate him from Susan's LPradical cause. This is fundamentally a debate about the LP Platform, and the pre-Portland Platform was written by Murray Rothbard and his acolyte Bill Evers in the latter 1970s. Also, in answer to the LP radical's roster question Just how radical are you?, Susan describes herself as Murray Rothbard's intellectual love child (or at least she did back before she expelled me from access to her Y Group). Rothbard was the undisputed intellectual leader of the original Radical Caucus, and the reincarnated Caucus was only a couple weeks ago discussing how much of Rothbard's original ten-point radical strategy document to endorse as their own. The 2004 Platform (the limits of your ignorance about which we've yet to discover) inherited much of its language and structure, and effectively all of its ideology, from the Rothbard/Evers versions of the latter 1970s. TB) While he loves to call others absolutists, it would seem that on certain issues like the purpose of the LP, it is he that is the absolutist. (TB In this debate (and others like it) I only use absolutist/m in one specific context: the Rothbardian absolutist interpretation of the principle against force initiation. It's just ignorant to say I'm equally absolutist about the purpose of the LP, as I in fact am on record as disagreeing somewhat with the LP Purpose position that in the debate above I said most LRC members probably support. Instead of the narrow purpose of electing Libertarians, the LP purpose I've long argued for is: to implement and give voice to the Statement of Principles by uniting voters who want more liberty behind the electoral choices that will most move public policy in a libertarian direction. TB) The notion that there can be a platform that represents every person who claims to be a libertarian is a fantasy. (TB I agree, and within the LRC leadership I've argued against the all libertarians slogan. Whenever I use all libertarians, it's always clearly in the context of, and shorthand for, all schools of libertarianism. Gordon gave us strict word limits in the debate above, and I thought it was sufficient to use the phrase schools of libertarianism the six times that I did. Apparently not. I reject your unsubstantiated charge that I do not debate in a positive and civil manner. If you dispute a single one of my descriptions of any libertarian's views, then I challenge you to muster actual arguments against those descriptions, rather than hand-waving about me being accusatory. It's ludicrous to claim I'm the one who is putting radicals in the Rothbardian box; they hopped into it long before I arrived on the scene to point it out. You can (like Hogarth) pretend all you want that there aren't multiple identifiable principled schools of libertarianism, but wishing won't make it so. If you deny that Susan adheres to the rigid dogma of Rothbardianism, then quick -- tell us a single position where she disagrees with any principle of Rothbard's. Your charge that I seem to hate anarchists is apparently some form of psychological projection. Unlike some, I'm intellectually mature enough to be able to disagree with someone without hating him or questioning his motives. Your laughable charge that I create anarchists is belied by Hogarth and Montoni consistently censoring me and expelling me from the forums they control. Your closing profanity about bullshit renders ironic your opening charge that I have an anger management problem and come off as abrasive and rude. Ditto for Benedict's empty charge that I really came across as a jerk. When I make substantive arguments and my opponents can only sputter personal insults, that's as close to a concession as one ever sees in a discussion like this. Tom, the Pure Principles draft does not advocate participation, voluntary or not, in the Social Security system. Rather, it advocates that the current mandatory participation in the program be made voluntary. Proponents of SS bitterly oppose such a measure, because they know it would end the program. The only thing left for SS would be to settle the claims of its victims. I agree that there should be a separate National Campaign Program (like we had from 1990 to 2002) of specific and immediate legislative steps that we propose.
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Platform Action and Debates
Third Party Watch has published the parallel-interview debate to which Steve Gordon had last week invited me and Radical Caucus leader Susan Hogarth. Hogarth's tack was to paint Libertarian principles as an indivisible monolith whose message is being co-opted by the major power parties just as weak-kneed moderates are seeking to downplay some of those principles as challenging or intimidating. I in turn pointed out that there are multiple principled schools of libertarianism, and that the minority anarcholibertarian school that Hogarth thinks is the only principled one is in fact not being co-opted or hungered for at all. Hogarth was complimented by several fellow radicals for what they said was her uncharacteristic civility, as she studiously avoided defending (or even identifying) the positions that moderates find challenging, and similarly avoided all specific criticism of the draft moderate Platform. However, on Wednesday Hogarth wrote on her LPradicals forum:“[The reformers’] offering will be a true abomination. The platform committee is so stacked with people who embrace taxation and other uses of coercion that it can’t possibly produce anything that would be acceptable in toto to a roomful of libertarians. They will find out with this offering just exactly how far they have over-reached.”Simultaneously, Restore04 leader David Nolan ventured tentatively into a minor email skirmish with me before reverting to his position that he would rather debate via microphone than keyboard. (Nolan did, however, say some nice things about the Pure Principles draft, and in saying I'm not an enemy seemed to be retracting his invitation that I leave the LP if I don't like some parts of the 2004 Platform.) The skirmish arose in the wake of earnest efforts by Steve Kubby campaign aide Paulie Cannoli to arrange Platform debates on Steve's webradio show and/or on one of Paulie's blogs -- or the new LPradicals debate ghetto/honeypot Hogarth created after booting me from her other two forums. My counter-proposal is here.Even though LP radicals are just starting to notice it, the work of the 2008 PlatCom (announced by me and others to multiple forums since last summer) proceeds apace as our Feb 15 Las Vegas meeting approaches. The subcommittee working on the Pure Principles draft has now grown to 10 of PlatCom's 20 voting spots, and most notable among its recent votes has been an endorsement of the Bylaws Committee's recommended tweak to the Statement of Principles.The PlatCom now has an official web site for posting our drafts and a blog for discussing them, supplementing the [EMAIL PROTECTED] suggestion box that was announced last September. The Restore04 petition is up to about 160 signatures, but the Platform community breathlessly awaits news about the responses pouring in from the past and prospective NatCon delegates who received the PlatCom Chair's recent survey. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 1/13/2008 08:57:00 PM
[marketliberal] RE: [lpsf-discuss] Fw: [lpsf-activists] Questions for the Candidates for Chair and Vice-Chair
Phil Berg writes: PB) I plan to create a movement to promote economic liberty for the homeless. I think homeless Vets should be the first group of folks granted ecomic freedom. Then they sell more than streetsheets . They can sell hotdogs on the street, or start a little lottery, or drive a Jitney, all without penalty, they can work for whatever wage they want, when they want , for whatever pay they want. They can make any arrangement they want with a landlord and the landlord would be exempt from any other regulation other than honoring the lease. This would open up a big supply of empty units waiting to have title cleansed of rent control. Anyone who builds a home for homeless would be exempt from zoning laws. Any type of housing could be built, subject to liability under the common law. This is only an ideal. I would try to get a coalition of right and oriented leaders to support this idea. Replace the I with we, and something could happen. Credit to Starchild for the idea of seeking community support fotr this concept. (PB This is a brilliant idea. I'd love to see a SF nanny-stater's sputtering response to this idea in a debate.
RE: [marketliberal] Re: [Libertarian Intelligence] TNR Unearths More Racism, Homophobia in Ron Paul
BH) these new quotes will likely prove indefensible. (BH NS) do you honestly believe that Ron Paul is a racist? (NS No, and I've never said he was. He agrees that those quotes are indefensible.
[marketliberal] my comment on Last Free Voice
Knapp has indeed said he suspects Rockwell. It's only natural, given that 1) Rockwell was contributing editor on a newsletter whose worst articles the putatively upright Paul has strongly denied writing himself, and 2) if Rockwell's denial (at http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/01/10/who-wrote-ron-pa ul-s-newsletters.aspx) were true, then he would surely name names and end the scandal. I doubt that Knapp particularly hopes it was Rockwell, as Tom clearly has enough intellectual honesty not to only say things that have ulterior motives. I indeed would be tickled if it were Rockwell, but at this point it hardly matters, since it was obviously someone that the kooky paleolibertarians around Paul are trying to protect, and by doing so they merely bring the taint onto themselves. It would be specious to act as if Paul's and Rockwell's denials are the end of the story, to be chalked up as an impenetrable mystery.
[marketliberal] Restore04 vs. Pure Principles
, and optional challenge to the Judicial Committee. Instead of being the logical union of all possible documents of the type surveyed above, the Platform should just proclaim the core principles that such documents aren't allowed to disagree with. Do we really need to be able to haul our candidates or publications before the APRC because they don't toe the Platform line on the Civil War, Antarctica, video terminals, extra-terrestrial resources, and digital audio tape? I don't see that you answered my question at all; repealing the PATRIOT Act is not a principle, but rather an implementation detail of a particular application of our principles. A valid answer would have been either secession or the right to die -- two topics I'm working to get addressed in our draft. So I still would like to know: what do you think is the most important libertarian principle that a majority of NatCon delegates would agree is missing from our draft? And if you can't name one, would you please tell your fellow members of LPradicals to stop claiming that we reformers are pushing a Platform that is unprincipled? Any fair reading of it shows that is 100% Pure Principles: http://libertarianmajority.net/pure-principles-platform . Brian Holtz -Original Message- From: David F. Nolan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 6:33 PM Subject: Re: Platform proposal debates? OK, Brian, speaking (writing) strictly for myself, here is my response to your question, which will be my opening statement on the platform discussion panel in LV next month, perhaps with minor changes: The Purpose of the Platform The purpose of the Libertarian Party's national platform is to provide our candidates and the voting public with a clear, understandable set of policy prescriptions that are fully consistent with our Statement of Principles. The platform needs to explicitly address issues of current concern (e.g. the Iraq War, the PATRIOT Act, the War on Drugs, etc.) rather than simply taking broad stands that could easily be misinterpreted or ignored. We do not formulate our platform to make it easier to elect people to office; rather, we run candidates to promulgate our party's stands, as codified in the platform. Where your Greatest Hits proposal falls down, in my opinion, is in its lack of specifics. There's simply no mention of the the issues I cite above, or many others. If our goal is to have a platform that anyone from Republican Wayne Root, to Greenie Jingozian, to Libertarian Steve Kubby can run on, then your proposal ain't bad. But that should not be our goal. Our platform derives from our principles, and if it makes some people (including prospective candidates) uncomfortable, they should go elsewhere. Maybe the Unity '08 crowd would welcome them. Brian Holtz wrote: I started asking the Radical Caucus for feedback on our draft as far back as April, and gave up hope of ever getting any right around the time they banned me from their discussion list. The question I want answered is: what is the most important libertarian principle that a majority of NatCon delegates would agree is missing from our draft? I've asked this of radicals in about as many ways as I know how, and haven't ever gotten a cogent answer. (Best efforts: 1 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LPplatform-discuss/message/2823 2 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LPplatform-discuss/message/2815 ) Now, five weeks before we adopt this draft, it would be nice to finally get one. Brian
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] TNR Unearths More Racism, Homophobia in Ron Paul N...
James Kirchik at The New Republic quotes lots of vile things from 1990s-vintage editions of the Ron Paul newsletter, presumably written by Paul himself. Questionable comments from those newsletters have been quoted out of context before, but these new quotes will likely prove indefensible. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 1/08/2008 01:02:00 PM
[marketliberal] Not run-of-the-Miller Ron Paul bashing
Sorry, Starchild, but I have to call bullshit on you calling bullshit on Brian Miller. The TNR article isn't run-of-the-Miller Ron Paul bashing using mind-reading and unsubstantiated allegations. It's full of direct quotes from Paul's newsletter, many of them quite damning. I don't doubt that some of them are pulled out of context, but the overall effect makes Paul (and Lew Rockwell) look very bad. Not surprisingly, the only response so far at LewRockwell.com is name-calling: http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018433.html .
RE: [marketliberal] Re: LPRadicals-Debate
Tom Knapp wrote: TK) What's the matter, Colonel Sanders ... chicken? (TK I stated the matter: no public archive. Also: not nearly as big an audience as LPplatform-discuss, nor any kind of reputation on the part the moderators for the forum to be moderated as advertised -- in fact, quite the opposite. TK) Any radical shots I have to take, including return fire, I'll take at LPRadicals-Debate. (TK Why only there? What's the matter Colonel Sanders ... chicken? :-) But far be it from me to tease you for graciously conceding me what will appear to so many (including me) to be the last word. When you get your A game back down in the minors, you'll know where to find The Show. :-)
[marketliberal] RE: Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It (Charles Johnson, FEE, December 2007)
Starchild, it sounds like Charles Johnson is to a certain extent a victim of the leftish fallacy that economies of scale are somehow equivalent to aggression. We geolibertarians don't impose our personal aesthetic judgment about whether malls or Burning Man are better; we just say: take away the force initiation and the subsidized location monopolies and let the people decide, through their bottom-up consensual market behavior. For more on how truly market-based private communities would differ from the current system of subsidized landholding, see * Private Communities as http://www.foldvary.net/works/pcnb.html the Natural Benchmark * The Enterprise of http://mises.org/journals/jls/17_4/17_4_1.pdf Community * The http://www.independent.org/pdf/events/2004-02-04-vcoutline.pdf Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society For a portal onto the geolibertarian/Georgist worldview that poverty can only exist with the denial of people's natural right of access to land (and how that denial distorts the marginal product of labor and thus wages), see http://www.wealthandwant.com/. Brian Holtz http://LibertarianIntelligence.com http://libertarianintelligence.com/ Signal Intelligence About The LP
[marketliberal] RE: Banned from lpradicals-discuss
Dan Sullivan wrote: BH) Verily, I am... (BH DS) Or, perhaps, incredibly tactless, annoying, self-centered and disruptive. (DS Tactless? I was accused of hypocrisy on a public forum (by a moderator there who calls me a deformer) and denied the opportunity to defend myself there. This is the same forum where the archives still describe me as a war pig. (Quick, quote the worst epithet I've ever used against any radical. Go ahead. Make my day. I never have used one, and never will. That's just how I roll.) The moderators there haven't so much as batted an eyelash at such piss being splashed around in the LPradicals living room. I guess some piss is sweeter than others. :-) Does tact require that I not take an opportunity to defend myself on the sister forum -- the one that was advertised as an unmoderated, open, sandbox-style list for wide open discussion? I protested Montoni's charge of hypocrisy by demonstrating how it applies to him. You recently protested http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lpradicals/message/2315 LP Vice Chair Chuck Moulton's use of the word idiotic by suggesting he may be lying and saying the LP bureaucracy still has its heads up its assets. I never initiate imagery anywhere near that crude, and yet you're lecturing me about tact. Self-centered? Yes, I defend my self. I don't see many others volunteering to do it (with notable exceptions like Starchild and Tom Knapp and Beau Cain). Annoying? Disruptive? I'm indeed perceived that way by many who seem to feel threatened by what I have to say. No surprise there. DS) On the face of the actual, individual post, I would not have banned you. However, I wondered at the time if you were partly a victim of your reputation preceding you. This confirms it. (DS Of course I was. The question is: what is it about what I write that makes a radical like Hogarth fear me having posting privileges? Someone gave the answer on LPradicals itself last http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lpradicals/message/1553 August: ) in my personal experience, the radical problem with Brian is not that he's unethical or sneaky, but precisely the opposite -- that he's happy to engage his opponents head-on in open debate, that he's GOOD at it, and that many of us, not being as good at it as he is, tend to lose ... not because we're wrong but because we don't argue as well. That being the case, my argument is get over it -- GET better at making radical arguments, because trying to avoid our stronger opponents is NOT the way to win. I'm frankly MORE comfortable in arguing in a forum hosted by my opponent, because doing so forces me to rely on the strength of my arguments rather than being tempted by shortcuts that may work in one place, but not in another. You build muscle by lifting weight, not by slinking past the gym and promising to visit it later. ( (To find out who said it, click the link above soon, before Hogarth deletes the post from the archive.) DS) It also suggests that you are clueless about what your reputation is (DS You may think you know my reputation, but you don't know the first thing about me. I'm the reformer who in Portland protested the de-credentialing of the radical Starchild by giving him my voting proxy on the floor and then voting the way he would on every subsequent motion -- against my own reformer interests. I'm the reformer who stood up to repeated public threats from a purist that I'll be beaten to a bloody pulp if I didn't delete a blog posting http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=274 that satirized that purist LPCA ExCom member by compiling quotes from him. I'm the moderate who gave arch-purist LPCA Southern Vice Chair Mark Selzer technical help in posting the recording that cleared him of the then-LPCA-moderate-leadership's charges of invoking the state against the Party -- charges that I had defended before hearing the recording. I'm the PlatCom reformer rivaled only by the Outright Libertarians Chair as PlatCom's most http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OutrightLibertarians/message/3111 vocal defender of gay rights, but who has been repeatedly http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2530 and publicly http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2244 and demonstrably http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2249 lied about by him and the California Outright coordinator on multiple forums, with never a single apology or retraction or complaint from a moderator. If anyone is clueless here, it's not me. DS) Banned from four lists, presumably by at least two different moderators? Could the problem be you and not them? (DS Let's see, two of the bannings were by Susan Hogarth, and the other two were in gay-dominated forums (Outright Libertarians and LP of San Francisco) where I dared to protest the lies about me by these two Outright leaders. See the pattern? Holtz gives evidence to rebut personal attack, gets banned. I would ask that you think for yourself and critically examine the
[marketliberal] RE: LPRadicals-Debate
No thanks, I wouldn't stoop to debate on any radicals forum that would have me as a member. :-) Radicals who want a piece of me can bring their A game to LPplatform-discuss or LibertarianReformCaucus, like you and Starchild do. The rest of them can stay cloistered in the Hogarth/Montoni chain of low-rent convents for fragile wayward radicals, trading if only stories with Marc and Angela about how cool it would be to find a reformer willing to face their devastating arguments. What's most hilarious about this effort to create a Holtz ghetto among their online holdings is that they forgot to make its message archive public. They couldn't find open-ness in a can-opener factory... No, wait -- they couldn't find Open at an open-source conference. No, try: they couldn't do Open at a garage-door-opener factory. Aw crap, I just can't do snarky. Better stick with boring ol' substance... Brian Holtz http://LibertarianIntelligence.com http://libertarianintelligence.com/ Signal Intelligence About The LP
[marketliberal] I strengthened PlatCom's gay rights plank on the day the Outright Libs expelled me
[context: *http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2535 Fair Use is not stealing *http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2530 Either truth matters, or it doesn't *http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2529 Re: Message not approved *http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2523 Re: Restoration of 2004 LP Platform ] Outright moderator Allan Wallace writes to the Outright leadership (whom I lack permission to address): AW) Wikipedia is an ever-changing weather vane of public opinion. Someone who quotes Wikipedia as a source of truth clearly does not know what truth is. Perhaps you are one of those nuts that believe there is no such thing as objective reality, that reality is what YOU think it is, and that reality changes when you change your mind. (AW Calm down, Allan. The feverishness and absurdity of the above illustrates perfectly why you should have recused yourself at the outset from the decision of whether to censor my rebuttal of your own arguments. It's ironic for you to dismiss the premier Internet encyclopedia's straightforward and undisputed definition of the Internet phenomenon known as cross-posting, and it's downright bizarre for you to infer from my citation of it that I might be a complete metaphysical subjectivist or solipsist. (Readers will note the additional irony that Allan's elliptical construction perhaps you are one of those nuts is in fact a much more scurrilous personal attack than the ones he accused, tried, and convicted me for -- namely, my detailed and unrebutted demonstrations that people had made deliberately false statements about me.) AW) Fair use has nothing to do with this. From the very beginning you knew we had restrictions to participate in OutrightLibertarians. Even when we clearly restated those restrictions to you, you flaunted and ignored them. (AW You mean like when you ignored your own rules by letting Brian Miller post serial personal attacks on me, including an oblique reference to my intimate relations with my wife? You mean like when you ignored your own rules by letting Beau Cain quote me saying things that you said justified censoring the message in which I said them? AW) We continued to remind you of them, and still you ignored our reminders. Any decent person would have stopped posting to another group until the matter was settled, not you. (AW Any decent moderator would have answered my question about what you were objecting to, but not you. If you object to your rulings being subject to public scrutiny, that's all one needs to know about them. AW) BTW, while I was there, I took a look at your group. You edited and thereby misrepresented what I said in several cases. I edited out just 3 words that were truly offensive at the end of one sentence, one time on one post of yours, and that after you had been warned several times for offensive statements you made that were not edited. Yet, you acted like I cut half of everything you ever submitted. (AW Nonsense. I wrote: (To the moderator: does it qualify me not to have my protests against personal attacks be censored? Anyone wondering what happened to the 2nd sentence of my first posting this morning can read the original here http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2456 .) My comment made it perfectly clear that only one of my sentences was censored. It's simply scurrilous for you to claim I was suggesting that all of my posts were being systematically censored. Please stop making stuff up about me. Have you no shame, sir? AW) The truth is that you CAN quote from any Yahoo group you want. Just because you CAN do a thing, does not mean that it is RIGHT do that thing. You might be able to quote from our group without the permission of the author and remain a member of YAHOO, but you cannot do that and remain a member of our Yahoo group. (AW Yet another delicious irony. The one who is invoking his raw power to do something unfair is YOU, in your final sentence above. My invocation of the Fair Use doctrine is not me simply noting what I can get away with; it's me agreeing with a codification of what the vast majority of people (who aren't self-serving self-dealing Outright censors) agree is fair. (Hence the name fair use.) Again, you don't even dare to dispute whether the Fair Use doctrine is a commendable one, just as you didn't dare above to dispute the definition of cross-posting. You just say our policy is our policy, and flex your right of association to arbitrarily exclude me. I'll always defend your right to do that, but that doesn't mean it isn't shameful. AW) Using someone's words without there permission is impolite at the least and stealing at the worst, and both are un-libertarian. (AW Argument by assertion. Fair-use quoting is not stealing, and it's just laughable to claim otherwise. I'd be shocked if you could get a Beau Cain or a Rich Newell to agree
[marketliberal] RE: I'm Becoming Concerned
Beau wrote (among other things): ) I understand and support Allan Wallace's complaint that some of our YahooGroup postings were shared in other communities without permission. Some members of OL may have legitimate trepidations about someone finding out that they subscribe, so I support our no-sharing policy. ( Ohmigod, I confess it had never occurred to me that members might (of course!) have some privacy concerns about being identified as belonging to the forum (whose archives are after all public). That's what I get for being a Bay Area Libertarian for so long! That's a completely reasonable justification for a policy of not identifying members outside the forum, but that's not what Allan complained about, nor was it mentioned in the guidelines. I will of course refrain from identifying outside the forum anybody who I could possibly suspect does not want his membership status made public. Thanks for your support, and feel free to forward this confession of obtuseness you see fit.
RE: [marketliberal] Re: Message not approved: Loyalty
Thomas L. Knapp wrote: TK) Everyone has bad habits. One of yours is quoting a dictionary definition of something, then blithely pretending that what you just quoted was the dictionary definition of that thing. [...] If you want to bandy dictionary definitions, WordNet's first definition for the verb form of censor is forbid the public distribution of. (TK WordNet? LOL. There are two authoritative dictionaries: Merriam-Webster's (best for modern usage) and OED (best for historical usage). OneLook.com also links into some second-tier ones, notably American Heritage and Random House, and a host of third-tier dictionaries, which WordNet barely qualifies as. (WordNet doesn't even call itself a dictionary, but rather a lexical database.) When I say the dictionary, I'm almost always referring to M-W, but sometimes to OED or American Heritage (which is Yahoo's choice). When I say the dictionary, I am never referring to WordNet. TK) Your use of the word censor with reference to lpradicals isn't an accurate descriptive usage. (TK It is, according to the best dictionaries: M-W: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable OED: suppress or remove unacceptable parts of (a book, film, etc.) AH: to examine and expurgate
[marketliberal] Montoni's hypocrisy
Marc Montoni (aka Archimedes aka amcambassador) wrote: MM) Do me a favor, Brian. Mind your ISP's usage policies and cease sending me unsolicited email. (MM I don't send email through my ISP. The mail-sending agent that I do use has no policy against sending email to public figures (e.g. the Secretary of the LPVA) who write about me on public forums. MM) I believe you're now up to about seven or eight messages to me for every one of mine to you. (MM Your beliefs are at variance with reality. My records show only four other emails that I've ever sent to you: * An Aug http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/1973 10 response to an LPradicals posting in which you twice used the epithet deformers as you said They've always been quick to malign the motives of anyone who takes the radical line; and many of them are extremely quick with personal insults and ironically complained that a reformer doesn't ever actually reply to any of the points I raise; * A Sep 9 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2059 response to an LPradicals posting in which you called me a brick; * A Nov 2 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2364 response to an LPradicals posting in which you said that a document I wrote constituted whining and asked I wonder if any of our reformer spies would like to comment on that particular brand of hypocrisy; * A Nov http://groups.yahoo.com/group/marketliberal/message/2377 7 response to a Bylaws blog posting in which you talked about LP candidates who believe in gun control in citing a survey in which I was the 2nd-lowest rated LP candidate. All but the first of the above emails were in response to your public criticisms aimed specifically at me. All of them were courtesy cc's of replies mentioning you that would be publicly copied to my own forum and that you were unlikely to notice (due to censorship on LPradicals and obscurity in the Bylaws blog comments). My email to you yesterday was merely me using reply-to-all to correct a reformer's criticism of the radicals -- a correction you welcomed by describing it as wisdom. Thus it's silly for you to pretend I'm somehow stalking you. I'm simply correcting the public allegations you make against me, and making sure that you see the corrections. If you want to stop getting corrected in this way, it's obvious what you should do. (Hint: whining about unsolicited email is the wrong answer.) MM) If the fact that I have nothing to say to you (at least about the radical vs reform debate) bothers you, well, just let it go. (MM That you have nothing to say TO me doesn't bother me, but instead delights me as it ensures that my corrections of your statements become the last word. No, it's what you say ABOUT me, and not what you don't say TO me, that motivates my corrections of you. I don't know how that could be any more obvious. MM) Just in case you feel like sending mail to me again, I won't get it, as I've just added your address to the spam filter at my ISP. (MM Delightful. MM) Thank you all for doing something *productive* for liberty today**. Note: That doesn't mean writing voluminous email screeds to other libertarians who don't shut up and toe your line of perfection. (MM This ludicrous perfection strawman is a handy gauge of your cognitive dissonance. I'm working to make the Party's fundamental documents more officially tolerant of the various principled schools of libertarianism, while you're trying to make them intolerant of anything but Rothbard's absolutist and idiosyncratic answers to the myriad free variables in libertarian theory: http://knowinghumans.net/2007/12/varieties-of-principled-libertarianism.html . You radicals are the ones insisting that the Platform reflect a standard of perfection, not me. And I have NEVER told anybody to shut up, but you and Susan have censored me from replying on LPradicals when you criticize me there by name. Hypocrisy, indeed.
[marketliberal] RE: [OutrightLibertarians] Re: Restoration of 2004 LP Platform
Allan Wallace wrote: AW) I am still not happy with your posting our discussions on another group! If I want my opinions on another group I will put them there myself. It is extremely impolite to post someone's opinions elsewhere without their permission. (AW OutrightLibertarians is a public forum, readable by anyone with an Internet connection, and devoted exclusively to commentary about public political topics. It clearly falls within Fair Use for me to quote anything said here for the non-commercial purpose of political commentary. There is no question that my quotes have always been fair and in context. 'Politeness does not dictate that I'm not allowed to comment anywhere else on what I read here, and I will continue to do so. Further, I consider it a courtesy to those I'm replying to here that I use a cc: to indicate where else I'm commenting about them, so that they may respond there if they wish. Your only possible reasonable objection to my practice would be that if it were causing an unwelcome volume of cross-posting from people who read the other forum but not this one. However, there has never been a single such cross-posting. If seeing the cc: of the other forum is nevertheless so (conveniently) objectionable to you, I will endeavor to remember to use a bcc: instead of a cc:, since your belaboring this issue has made it sufficiently clear to the few who might care that this is my practice. Fair notice has been given. AW) How often is the platform committee recommendations accepted, as is, on controversial topics? Not very often in my experience. (AW This alleged fact is no basis for you realizing that gay rights will be in danger of removal from the Platform in Denver, and is a very flimsy basis for you ignoring the clear evidence to the contrary. It's just daft to suggest that the delegates in Denver are going to opt for a Platform that says even LESS than what the PlatCom draft will say. AW) There can be amendments or movements to eject whole sections or individual planks from the floor. And, they did not have the votes to remove it last time, but they have been gaining ground since then. (AW The old Sexual Rights plank came in 9th out of 61 in the 2002 voting, received 81% approval in the 2004 voting, and was almost exactly in the middle in terms of plank popularity in 2006 -- a year that non-reformers claim was an aberration unlikely to be repeated. Again, I'd love to know precisely who you think they are, and what specifically makes you think they have been gaining ground against Platform gay rights since 2006. AW) We need to stop the LP from becoming the Party of slightly more Principle than the Republican Party. (AW canard n. an unfounded or false, deliberately misleading story My takedown of the above propaganda stands unrebutted at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OutrightLibertarians/message/3120 . Here it is again: The Republican Party makes no effort to reverse all the myriad laws regulating prices, minimum wages, maximum hours, equal pay, plant closure, family leave, hiring, firing, occupational licensure, insurance policies, zoning, rents, product safety, drug efficacy, fuel efficiency, pollution mitigation technology, parental media control, media copying technology, etc. The GOP failed to use its legislative majority to start privatizing any of our socialized systems of education, health care, health insurance, agriculture, and retirement savings. The GOP supports regulations and bans on gambling, suicide, substance use, pornography, gay marriage, sexual services, reproductive services, and cloning. To compare moderate Libertarians to the Republican Party is at best obtuse, and at worst is -- well, something the censors here don't allow us to talk about. Brian Holtz http://LibertarianIntelligence.com http://libertarianintelligence.com/ Signal Intelligence About The LP
[marketliberal] RE: [lpradicals-discuss] Montoni's hypocrisy
Dan Sullivan wrote: DS) Why should any of us care about e-mails you send to Marc or Marc sends to you? (DS Because Marc is a moderator on LPradicals, and he uses that power to criticize me there by name and then deny me the privilege of answering him there. So I answer him here. How was this not obvious from my posting? DS) If Marc doesn't want e-mails from you, don't send them. (DS If Marc doesn't want me to answer his public criticisms of me, he shouldn't issue them. DS) If you don't want e-mails from Marc, tell him privately not to send them. (DS I invite any criticism, from Marc or anybody else, that can improve (or, by failing, validate) my proposals for LP policy. DS) That does not mean we want to hear people's snits about things that don't concern us. (DS The snit here was Marc's, apparently over the unfortunate fact that the universe isn't arranged so that he can publicly criticize me by name and not ever hear back from me about it. DS) We certainly don't care about the nuts and bolts of how somone's e-mail leaves his computer. (DS If an LPradicals moderator tries to tell me (in front of a cc'd audience you don't know about but that includes people on this forum) that my responses to his public criticisms of me on LPradicals constitute some kind of force initiation (i.e. contract violation) by me, then I'm going to correct that criticism here as well. Every time. Brian Holtz http://LibertarianIntelligence.com http://libertarianintelligence.com/ Signal Intelligence About The LP
RE: [marketliberal] Re: Message not approved: Loyalty
Thomas L. Knapp wrote: TK) Your use of the word censor with reference to lpradicals isn't an accurate descriptive usage. (TK BH) It is, according to the best dictionaries: M-W: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable OED: suppress or remove unacceptable parts of (a book, film, etc.) AH: to examine and expurgate (BH TK) Merriam-Webster DOES reflect the governmental context of the word censor. Your second-tier designated American Heritage Dictionary also reflects that context. (TK Non-responsive. Your claim above stands refuted.
RE: [marketliberal] Re: Message not approved: Loyalty
Tom Knapp wrote: TK) The ACTUAL entry, as opposed to your context-stripped excerpt, includes no fewer than four references to the governmental origin and meaning of the term -- two to officials and two to magistrates (TK I've never denied that the noun censor can be used to describe a government force-initiator. You, however, have denied that it can describe anyone else. That's just silly. You're quoting the entry for the noun censor, I'm talking about the verb derived from it. The entirety of the M-W entry for the verb is: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable censor the news; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable censor out indecent passages The fact remains that a textual substitition of either of these two definitions for how I used the verb censor retains the meaning I intended. It's just laughable to call me petty, trite and deceptive for using a word as shorthand for the exact phrase that M-W uses to define it. Case closed. P.S. Note that even the M-W noun definition supports my usage: an official who examines materials (as publications or films) for objectionable matter. A moderator of LPradicals is obviously an official of the group. Again, you've quoted precisely nothing to support your contention that the word censor can only connote government force initiation.
[marketliberal] RE: Message not approved: Restoration of 2004 LP Platform
Allan, please clarify. Are you demanding that I apologize for, and desist from, 1. cc'ing my OutrightLibertarians postings to other forums; 2. bcc'ing my OutrightLibertarians postings to other forums; 3. forwarding my own OutrightLibertarians postings to other forums; or 4. some combination of the above? You obviously have a vested interest in seeing that my last response to you didn't reach the Outright forum, so it's interesting that you didn't recuse yourself on this matter and ask another moderator to decide it. I'm quite confident you have never ever had a member quit because some poster had a policy of bcc'ing his postings to an archive of his public writings from which no reader had ever cross-posted back to your forum. As for consistently step[ping] over these boundaries unchecked, can you say Brian Miller? Are you going to ask Miller to apologize to the group for his guideline violations (that I document in an email accompanying this one)? Have you ever asked a non-straight person to apologize to the forum? Please forward this to the relevant Outright body of appeal, including an unedited copy of the message you censored (which I append below). Brian Holtz http://LibertarianIntelligence.com Signal Intelligence About The LP -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Allan Wallace Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2008 12:45 PM To: Brian Holtz Subject: Message not approved: Restoration of 2004 LP Platform Brian Holtz; You have declared (below) that you will not stop the practice of cross-posting another author's comments without the permission, in spite of being politely warned twice before. The fair use policy you spoke of covers only whether or not Yahoo allows you to participate in their groups generally. Yahoo allows the creators and moderators of each group to decide who may and may not be members of that individual group. Your opinion of what our guidelines should be is beside the point. We have set up these guidelines over the group's nearly 7 year history because we have found that members who adhere to the guidelines quit when someone consistently steps over these boundaries unchecked. Please post an apology to the group and promise not to cross-post without permission again. Please do so immediately and before posting anything else to the group. -Allan Wallace, Moderator OutrightLibertarians Yahoo Group OutrightLibertarians is a public forum, readable by anyone with an Internet connection, and devoted exclusively to commentary about public political topics. It clearly falls within Fair Use for me to quote anything said here for the non-commercial purpose of political commentary. There is no question that my quotes have always been fair and in context. 'Politeness does not dictate that I'm not allowed to comment anywhere else on what I read here, and I will continue to do so. -Original Message- From: Brian Holtz [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, January 01, 2008 11:27 AM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: [OutrightLibertarians] Re: Restoration of 2004 LP Platform Allan Wallace wrote: AW) I am still not happy with your posting our discussions on another group! If I want my opinions on another group I will put them there myself. It is extremely impolite to post someone's opinions elsewhere without their permission. (AW OutrightLibertarians is a public forum, readable by anyone with an Internet connection, and devoted exclusively to commentary about public political topics. It clearly falls within Fair Use for me to quote anything said here for the non-commercial purpose of political commentary. There is no question that my quotes have always been fair and in context. 'Politeness does not dictate that I'm not allowed to comment anywhere else on what I read here, and I will continue to do so. Further, I consider it a courtesy to those I'm replying to here that I use a cc: to indicate where else I'm commenting about them, so that they may respond there if they wish. Your only possible reasonable objection to my practice would be that if it were causing an unwelcome volume of cross-posting from people who read the other forum but not this one. However, there has never been a single such cross-posting. If seeing the cc: of the other forum is nevertheless so (conveniently) objectionable to you, I will endeavor to remember to use a bcc: instead of a cc:, since your belaboring this issue has made it sufficiently clear to the few who might care that this is my practice. Fair notice has been given. AW) How often is the platform committee recommendations accepted, as is, on controversial topics? Not very often in my experience. (AW This alleged fact is no basis for you realizing that gay rights will be in danger of removal from the Platform in Denver, and is a very flimsy basis for you ignoring the clear evidence
[marketliberal] Either truth matters, or it doesn't
I didn't bother sending this when I originally wrote it, since Beau Cain embarrassed you enough by enthusiastically quoting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OutrightLibertarians/message/3313 on the Outright forum most of the message from me that you had just censored there. But now that you're censoring me again, please forward this in full to the relevant Outright body of appeal. Outright moderator Allan Wallace wrote: A) One of the two things that qualifies a member of this Yahoo Group for Moderation is personal attacks on another member. After an offensive personal comment is made, a warning usually goes out, but is not required. When the number of attacks reaches 2, Moderation is automatic. (A Except, it seems, when the attacked person is me. Brian Miller wrote on Nov http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OutrightLibertarians/message/3189 29: Brian Holtz's perspectives on gay issues are as enlightening (and relevant) as my perspectives on how to pleasure a woman and raise children. This implict reference to my wife was crude and offensive, and I of course have never offered perspective on anything remotely analogous to gay sexual intimacy. Brian Miller wrote on Dec http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OutrightLibertarians/message/3294 12: I don't indulge Holtz. It is amusing when a straight white guy in suburbia lectures a queer activist on gay stuff, but there's only so much of the amusement I can take, and I've got concrete policy to talk about. Holtz has demonstrated virtually no knowledge of any of the legislation in question [...] And when you assign authority to the arguments of a queer-policy-ignorant straight guy on the issue, it descends even further -- to the absurd. This was a blatant attempt to belittle me because of my demographic status and sexual orientation. Further, the claims about lecture on gay stuff and virtually no knowledge of the legislation were demonstrably false. For example, Miller has yet to respond to my repeated correction of his claim that 10 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/10/654.html U.S.C. § http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/10/654.html 654 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/10/654.html (the Don't Ask Don't Tell law) automatically applies to anyone caught in any gay event or venue. Instead, he just repeats his Big Lie ad nauseam about my alleged ignorance regarding gay-related legislation. And according to your standards, repeating a known falsehood does not count as a personal attack, but diagnosing it does. That's simply Orwellian. Brian Miller wrote on Dec http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OutrightLibertarians/message/3309 13: Sadly, James, Mr. Holtz is engaging in the sort of 'you gays' rhetoric with you that characterizes so much of some LPers' attitudes towards gay folks. This was yet another falsehood. I have NEVER EVER attempted to characterize as homogenous the political views of gays, or of gay libertarians, or even of the Outright Libertarians. This was blatant and unsubstantiated mendacity about me, and you denied me the ability to correct it. Do you think Miller's statement about me is true, or do you just not care whether it's false? A) If a member has a problem with the moderation he or she has received, that member is free to appeal the Moderator's decisions to the Executive Committee of Outright Libertarians who may order the Moderator to take some action for or against the member, or may replace the Moderator as he serves at their will. (A I hereby so appeal. I stand by EVERY WORD I've written about Miller, and I can substantiate it and document it in full detail. You or Miller can pick whatever you consider my most egregious offense was, and I'll stand by it 100%. Is truth not a defense among the Outright Libertarians? Does being an Outright officer mean Miller can issue personal attacks in violation of your stated policies to an audience of 150 Libertarians, and any attempt to rebut and accurately characterize those attacks is ruled as automatically worthy of censorship? Is this 1984? A) NOTE: Outright Libertarians is our name. The organization as a whole is sometimes referred to as Outright and sometimes abbreviated as OL. But, our members are never referred to as Outrights. If you really had the close relationship you claim to have with some of our members, you would know this. (A Are you seriously disputing my invocation of Beau Cain and Mark Johnson and Rich Newell and Starchild as character witnesses for me? Do you really think I would publicly name them like I have if I had the slightest doubt that they would vouch for my integrity? My work with them has been in the context of the LPCA, not the OL. A) BTW: Within a minority, language that would be unacceptable in general society is acceptable between members of the same minority. When anyone outside that minority tries to use that language it is almost always deemed offensive. (A If Outrights is not what OL members call eath other, then what language of mine is this advisory in
[marketliberal] RE: [OutrightLibertarians] Re: Just when you thought the Ron Paul revolution couldn't be more embarrassing. . .
Brian Miller wrote: BM) Paul's position that the teaching of religious mythology as alternative theories in science deserves government funding is unlibertarian. (BM If that were Paul's position, you could quote him saying it. I'm quite confident you cannot. Brian Holtz http://LibertarianIntelligence.com http://libertarianintelligence.com/ Signal Intelligence About The LP
RE: [marketliberal] Re: Message not approved: Loyalty
Thomas L. Knapp wrote: TK) The list in question (lpradicals) has never been censored. It is a private group workspace (TK censor vt. to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable I was a member of the group. Some of my postings were allowed. Others were not, obviously because their content embarrassed those controlling the forum. Then I was summarily expelled from the group. Calling that censorship is not the same thing as alleging that force was initiated. It's silly to claim that a person or institution can never be aptly described as censoring just because its actions don't initiate force.
RE: [marketliberal] Re: Message not approved: Loyalty
Thomas L. Knapp wrote: TK) Quoth Brian Holtz: (TK What Brian Holtz quoted was the dictionary definition of 'censor', which you omitted. Stop slinking past the gym, and hit the weights. :-) BH) It's silly to claim that a person or institution can never be aptly described as censoring just because its actions don't initiate force. (BH TK) Not as silly as it is to claim that a group not allowing its online workspace to be used by a person opposed to the group, for purposes opposed to the group's purposes, is censorship (TK One claim is consistent with the dictionary definition of 'censor', and the other isn't. QED.
[marketliberal] RE: [OutrightLibertarians] Re: Restoration of 2004 LP Platform
Allan Wallace wrote: AW) I signed the Restore 04 petition because I realized that if we do not restore the 2004 platform, Sexuality and Gender will the next plank put on the chopping block. (AW As I explained at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OutrightLibertarians/message/3120, gay rights are not on the chopping block, so I'm curious how you would realize otherwise. See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OutrightLibertarians/message/3150 for the gay rights language that is going into the leading PlatCom draft. AW) I could live with a simple restoration of the 04 wording because then the atmosphere for restoring the recently improved Sexuality and Gender wording would be favorable. (AW Friends of gay rights in the LP should not accept a risk of regression on the progress that was made in Portland. The Directional Principles subcommittee's draft is on track to preserve the entirety of the SG principles section, which was a solid improvement on the 2004 language.
[marketliberal] RE: [OutrightLibertarians] Just when you thought Brian Miller was done hating on Ron Paul and his supporters...
I agree with Rob's take on Ron Paul's apparent creationism. It's relevant not only for gay rights, but even more so because it underlines Paul's willingness to pander to the fundamentalist Christian Right, and it leads Paul to place undue emphasis on fetal rights over maternal rights. However, I think George Phillies is clearly stretching things when he says people who reject evolution are unfit to be President, because evolution in the form of microoganisms evolving to be drug-resistant is a serious issue for the health of our soldiers, and if you reject evolution you can't cope with Medical Corps issues in a sane manner. It's just not credible to claim we have evidence that Paul doesn't believe in microevolution/selection for drug resistance. Brian Holtz http://LibertarianIntelligence.com Signal Intelligence About The LP
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Phillies Joins Smith's Call For LNC Purge
Stephen Gordon at Third Party Watch points to a call by George Phillies that the entire LNC should resign for having invited Ron Paul to seek the LP nomination. This is a repeat of Phillies' call (that I reported Dec 22) that the LP needs at least one LNC member who would opposes the use of theft and fraud in our internal party spending. Phillies echoes fellow presidential hopeful Christine Smith, who I've reported has called for the entire LNC to be replaced. Steve Kubby's communications director Tom Knapp wrote on Dec 11 that The only circumstances under which I will even consider voting for the re-election of any member of the LNC who betrayed the party this weekend are if that member publicly apologizes to the party for his or her betrayal AND plausibly claims, with detail as to the circumstances, that he or she was subjected to extortion to secure the yes vote.Kubby himself, however, only questions the timing of the LNC move, saying it should have been done in February. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 12/29/2007 08:29:00 AM
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Phillies Slams Bylaw Proposal On Chair Experience
The LP Bylaws Committee proposed in October an anti-takeover provision that says in part: No person may serve as Chair or Vice-Chair who has not served as a member of the National Committee prior to the last general election for President. Yesterday LP presidential candidate and frequent LP Chair candidate George Phillies claimed on LPradicals thatWhat that sentence means is that only members of the current LNC can _serve_ (that's not the same as be elected ) as the next National Chair, and the current LNC (or perhaps its successor) are the only people who can supply the National Chair through the year 2014. Ernie Hancock, who is running for National Chair this time, appears to have worked out a great advantage he has relative to past years: He will be running against the incumbent. His disadvantage, if you note the tense of has served, is that if this Bylaw passes he will be unable to serve as National Chair, even if he is elected.I don't see how Phillies can read the rule that way, unless he's saying that every living alumnus of the LNC who served before Nov 2004 is also currently an LNC member -- which I find very hard to believe.Scott Lieberman points out on the BylawsCom blog that it's somewhat vague whether member includes alternates. I would guess not.The anti-takeover intent of the rule is good, but I don't see the point of requiring LNC tenure farther back than the previous term, and the qualifying positions might be expanded to include, say, state chairs. The more interesting anti-takeover proposal is the one to lengthen Judicial Committee terms to 14 years and stagger them so the whole committee never turns over at once. The core idea of avoiding complete turnover is a good one, but 14 years seems too long, and there should be some way for a super-majority of NatCon delegates to prematurely terminate a JudCom member. Maybe the margin of victory needed to defeat a JudCom incumbent could be proportional to the time left in her term? -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 12/29/2007 08:59:00 AM
[marketliberal] RE: [LPplatform-discuss] Re: Why the Platform?
Thom Gray wrote: TG) I wasn't aware of that section of the Bylaws; it essentially makes my concern bunk, because it means your hands are tied in even considering a truly refreshed and exigent platform. (TG Our hands are tied to START with the existing Platform, but the delegates can still follow our advice to erase it and start with a clean slate. That's what I'm hoping they'll do.
[marketliberal] Steve Kubby, force initiator
Tom Knapp writes about Steve Kubby: TK) In terms of long-range what would my libertopia look like? thinking, I haven't seen any great interest from him -- he's in presidential candidate mode right now, and his focus is on what could I accomplish if elected? (TK Right, and I want to know: what kinds of force would he initiate (or propose initiating or propose no longer being initiated) if elected?I would think that a so-called radical candidate could work up an answer to that at some point, but since Steve already lost his force-initation virginity on my question about the Sixth Amendment subpoena power, I agree that Steve is not as radical as he likes to tell radicals he is. TK) And in that vein, he's actually not particularly radical by comparison to many past LP candidates. (TK
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] TPW: Additional LP Platform Modification Movements
Stephen Gordon reports at Third Party Watch about the Greatest Hits draft working its way through PlatCom, and about Tom Knapp's World's Smallest Political Platform. In the comments, I correct some characterizations of the GH draft. Meanwhile, the Restore04 petition is up to about 50 names, but still only one voting member of the LNC or PlatCom or BylawsCom. An interesting addition to the list is Scott Olmsted, an old-school Rothbardian who surfaced in 2004 long enough to slap together a sometimes-live Rothbard Caucus website before again dropping from view. (The site said he was living in Encinitas, but he's AWOL from this century's archives of LPCA forums.) Rothbardian leaders in the LP tend to have a short membership half-life, as nearly all the leaders of the LP's original Rothbardian wing -- Rothbard, Evers, Garris, Raimondo, Franzi, Costello, Hunter, Weber, Rockwell, Blumert -- ended up abandoning the LP, many of them ending up in un-libertarian parties (usually the GOP) backing un-libertarian candidates (like Pat Buchanan). (Rothbard's lieutenants Evers and Franzi now even support the Iraq war -- doh!) -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 12/27/2007 08:09:00 PM
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Radicals Unveil Restore04 Platform Petition
of the Squyres-format 2004 Platform. The two key questions will be 1) whether a PlatCom majority develops around the Greatest Hits draft, and 2) whether the convention adopts the Bylaws Committee's proposed rule that the PlatCom's recommendations get an up-or-down vote before any amendments. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 12/26/2007 05:38:00 PM
[marketliberal] RE: CA Supreme Court - Malls now OK for Pamphleteers
Starchild wrote: SC) Good news! California shopping malls will no longer be able to prohibit peaceful political activity on the premises (see message below). This may not be strict libertarian orthodoxy (SC It's the exact opposite of libertarian, as Brian Miller correctly noted. I'm shocked that you would abandon libertarian principle on this just because it might help the Ron Paul campaign. SC) On a moral level, it can be argued that rent-seekers who receive large public subsidies of their facilities should not be able to deny members of the public the ability to exercise their basic rights in these facilities. (SC There is no basic right to behave on someone's property in a way that the owner has a stated policy of not allowing. You could make the same moral argument about any piece of real estate with road access or water service. Malls are a prototype for the sort of private communities that geolibertarian economist Fred Foldvary says are the best hope for replacing the force-initiating state with bottom-up consensual communities: http://www.foldvary.net/ec156/propcom.html . We need to protect these experiments from the tendrils of statism as much as we can.
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Ron Paul Backslides on Meet The Press
Videos and transcript are here. Highlights:Ever Hear of Payroll Taxes? If you got rid of the income tax today you'd have about as much revenue as, as we had 10 years ago, and the size of government wasn't all that bad 10 years ago. So there're sources of revenues other than the income tax. You know, you have, you have tariff, excise taxes, user fees, highway fees. So, so there's still a lot of money. Paul is either ignorant or disingenuous here. As I told PlatCom in August: Income and payroll taxes combine to constitute 82% of federal receipts. The kinds of taxes (excises and tariffs) that LP candidates (Paul, Browne, Badnarik) talk about keeping make up only 5% of federal receipts -- 15% if you include corporate income taxes. We shouldn't kid ourselves or others about how much we would be cutting federal receipts.Dondero. Russert quoted Eric Dondero about Paul's reaction to 9/11. Paul replied: Well, I'm, I'm surprised somebody like that who's a disgruntled former employee who literally was put out. At Third Party Watch, Dondero marshals evidence to dispute Paul's questionable claim that I’ve been a Republican all my life except for that one year that I ran as a Libertarian. Tom Blanton and (Paul critic) Tom Knapp give the obvious rejoinder: Paul was talking about years of candidacy, not years of active party membership.Backsliding.RUSSERT: If elected president, Paul says he would abolish public schools, welfare, Social Security and farm subsidies.REP. PAUL: OK, you may have picked that up 20 or 30 years ago, it's not part of my platform. As a matter of fact, I'm the only one that really has an interim program. Technically, a lot of those functions aren't constitutional.MR. RUSSERT: It was--when you ran for president in 1988, you called for the abolition of public schools. REP. PAUL: I, I bet that's a misquote. I, I do not recall that. I'd like to know where that came from, because I went... MR. RUSSERT: And Social Security? You're OK with Social Security now? REP. PAUL: I think we need to get--give--offer the kids the chance to get out. But right now, if I don't--if we don't save the money, we can't take care of the other. For instance, Social Security, I never voted to spend one penny of Social Security money. So I'm the one that has saved it. Now, if I save the money in this military operation overseas, I say take that money--and, and I say this constantly--don't turn anybody out on the streets. People we have conditioned--yes, technically we shouldn't have them, and it'd be nice to get rid of them, but I would say take care of the people that are dependent on us. Let them--and the only way you can do that is cut spending. If we don't, they're all going to be out in the street.Those RPMs you hear are Murray Rothbard spinning in his grave. You can bet that none of the 17 radical libertarian Paul supporters I list here will criticize Paul for the statements above, that are even too moderate for my taste.Earmarks and other gotchas. Russert grilled Paul over earmarks, but Paul stuck to his guns and somewhat persuasively compared earmarks to tax credits. Paul also handled the gotcha on term limits, and defended well his hardcore positions on drugs, civil rights laws, and Civil War contrarianism. Russert busted Paul for invoking Ronald Reagan even though he's harshly criticized Reagan's record. Paul's reply was to distinguish Reagan's campaign philosophy and promises from what he was able to accomplish.Non-GOP Run? MR. RUSSERT: If, if you do not win the Republican nomination for president, will you run as an independent in 2008? REP. PAUL: I have no intention to do that. MR. RUSSERT: Absolute promise. REP. PAUL: I have no intention of doing that. MR. RUSSERT: Well, but no intention's a wiggle word. REP. PAUL: Well, OK, I deserve one wiggle now and then, Tim. I mean, what the devil... MR. RUSSERT: So no--so no Shermanesque statement. REP. PAUL: You know, I... MR. RUSSERT: I will not sun as an independent. REP. PAUL: Well, I can be pretty darned sure that I have no intention, no plans of doing it, and that's about 99.9 percent. I don't like people who are such absolutists, I will never do this, or I will win, I'm going to come in first. I don't like those absolutists terms in politics. MR. RUSSERT: But the door's open a little bit. REP. PAUL: Not very much. It really isn't.At TPW, Tom Knapp still claims Paul is virtually certain to claim the LP nomination if he doesn't become the GOP frontrunner. Tom, I'll bet you a pizza dinner in Denver on that one. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 12/23/2007 11:25:00 PM
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Phillies Claims Major Press Coverage
The latest in George Phillies' steady stream of press releases says they now reach more than 6,500 media contacts across the United States and that his (excellent) anti-Romney Dec 20 release emphasizing the Constitution over the Bible has drawn major press coverage. However, it cites coverage only in the blogs of the Wall Street Journal, Austin Statesman and a Nashville TV station -- as opposed to their official news reporting.The release also says Phillies 2008 is one of the few Libertarian Presidential campaigns to earn major press coverage. For the candidates we cover, here are the number of hits returned by a Google News search on 2007-2008 for the candidate name and the keyword libertarian:16 Root13 Kubby 9 Phillies 2 SmithThe same search for Ron Paul yields 1,210 hits. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 12/22/2007 11:33:00 AM
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Ron Paul Should Embrace The Green Tax Shift
Leading geolibertarian economist (and former LP congressional candidate) Fred Foldvary recommends this week that Ron Paul adopt the green tax shift:Although Ron Paul opposes new taxes, it would be consistent with his free-market opposition to subsidies and corporate welfare to favor a green tax shift, replacing income taxes with pollution charges. It's fine to be able to sue polluters, but in some cases, the pollution affects a wide area, including the whole planet. A class-action lawsuit against a polluter such as a coal power plant implies that the polluter compensate all Americans and others affected as an on-going charge. This has the same effect as a pollution levy of the same amount.There is not a single candidate in the Republican or Democratic Party primary elections who is advocating the green tax shift. [It] would put the free-market movement in the vanguard of environmentalism rather than dragging behind. Freedom is green!Foldvary is exactly right. The Green Party is eclipsing the LP as America's third party, in part because of the LP's tradition of dogmatism and denial on environmental issues -- a tradition that is being challenged by a growing number of LP candidates and thinkers. Green libertarianism is the only kind of libertarianism that has a chance of significant success in the 21st century. LP Vice Chair Chuck Moulton is exactly right that environmentalism is a luxury good, in that wealthier societies demand a cleaner environment. The winning answer here is not the GOP's energy-industry cronyism, or the Democrats' nanny-state regulation, or the Green's socialist primitivism, or the LP's traditional litigationism. The winning answer is EcoLibertarianism. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 12/22/2007 08:23:00 PM
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] Nolan Volunteers as Ron Paul's LP VP
LP founder David Nolan writes on LPradicals Tu Dec 18 to game what he calls the unlikely possibility of Ron Paul seeking the LP nomination:This could be a good thing _IF_ he's willing to emphasize the issues where he is in sync with our core beliefs. And so far, those are the issues he's stressed in his campaign to date: anti-war, anti-tax, sound money, restoring civil liberties, etc. One determining factor as to his being our nominee will be his choice of running mate. Ideally, he will let the convention make that choice. If he tries to impose a non-libertarian choice on the delegates, this could be a problem. And ideally, those of us who favor a hard-line, consistent approach will be able to unite behind a preferred choice. (I'm available, if needed, as I am now semi-retired and financially secure.)I think the delegates would rubber-stamp pretty much anybody Paul wanted as VP, and with all due respect to Nolan, I doubt Paul would constrain himself to such a traditional LP insider. Paul himself already mentioned two excellent choices -- Walter Williams and John Stossel -- neither of whom the LP could ever hope to recruit on its own. But since I still think Paul is very unlikely to put an anticlimax on his R3volution by repeating his 1988 LP race, the most interesting question becomes: is there an LP candidate that could hope to get Ron Paul's endorsement?Paul has publicly said that his endorsement could only be won by a firmly antiwar candidate, so that rules out Ron Paul fan Wayne Allyn Root. George Phillies has effectively called Paul a homophobic bigot, and so nominating Phillies would pretty much write off not only a Paul endorsement but also the bulk of Paul's r3volutionaries. I can't imagine Paul endorsing Christine Smith, so only Steve Kubby would have a prayer of getting any kind of Paul nod. I doubt Paul would be willing to fully endorse (much less campaign for) an LP candidate foreordained to win the traditional meager LP vote share, but even an expression of approval or appreciation would surely clinch the nomination for Kubby.Nolan segways to the LNC inviting Ron Paul to try the LP as a fallback nomination:If Bill Redpath (or someone) did not contact the Paul campaign in advance to see how they'd react, then the LNC is a bunch of idiots. And if someone DID contact the Paul campaign first, then why did they proceed with the resolution? Weren't they told that there would be an almost immediate public rejection of the invitation? The timing seems even odder in light of the fact that Eric Garris at antiwar.com was in the process of putting together an ad for the February '08 issue of LP NEWS, wherein a blue ribbon list of Libertarians would have done just what the LNC did in December: asked Ron Paul to seek our nomination. The ad was to appear right AFTER the February 5th Mega-Primary, when it will almost certainly be clear that the GOP will not be nominating Dr. Paul. Redpath knew of this plan, and told Garris that there was something secret in the works. Clearly, he was referring to the planned LNC resolution. But why put the Paul campaign on the spot in December, thus virtually forcing Dr. Paul to say that he will not run a third-party campaign?But LP Executive Directory Shane Corey had already answered Nolan's question in a Dec 11 interview with Steve Kubby. He explained that LP National has been under blistering heat from the LP's rank and file to do something -- anything -- to support Ron Paul. So they did all the Bylaws would let them do, and were promptly and viciously attacked from both sides: some Paul supporters idiotically complained the LNC should have unilaterally endorsed Paul (and restored the Platform), while some LPiterians complained that the LNC wasn't putting the Party ahead of the cause of liberty. One such was George Phillies, who replied that we need to elect to the LNC at least one person whowould opposes the use of theft and fraud in our internal party spending, namely the fraud of telling donors that the LNC is raising money to support the Libertarian Party, and then taking the money to support a Republican.He also said one unnamed LNC membergave the LNC a fraudulent statement of his conflicts of interest, namely failing to disclose that he supports *two* Republican Presidential candidates.Meanwhile, Tom Knapp advised the radicals to respond to a Ron Paul coronation byhorse-trad[ing] for [...] a radical VP candidate as the price of not having a down-and-dirty public nomination fight. Yes, the radicals would lose such a fight by an overwhelming margin ... but we could lose it very VISIBLY. If we have the chance to extract a price for putting on our Sunday best and our brightest smiles, we should do so.Heh. Please, Tom, hurt us mainstream Libertarians with the problem of more LP radicals lying down in front of the Ron Paul steamroller. :-) Much of the its weight will come from the 17 radicals I've already spotted riding it. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian
[marketliberal] [Libertarian Intelligence] TPW: Ernest Hancock Running Again For LP Chair
Stephen Gordon reports at Third Party Watch that Libertarian radical and Ron Paul supporter Ernest Hancock (whose website is the RSS-challenged Freedom's Phoenix) texted him today to say he will again oppose Bill Redpath for LP Chair. Gordon says Hancock told him to link to this announcement, which is unchanged from its use in April 2006 to announce Hancock's Chair candidacy for that year. (The page still says Hancock wants to prepare an ass kicking foundation for a 2008 presidential election cycle. However, the endorsements page has been cleared of the 2006 endorsements and now only has one. In the comments at TPW, LNC member and Redpath supporter Wes Benedict jibes Hancock by pointing out that the state LP site in Hancock's native Arizona hasn't been updated since 2006.) In 2006, Redpath got 64%, to 23% for Hancock and 9% for George Phillies. In 2004, Dixon got 76%, to 16% for Phillies and 9% for Hancock. Hancock's announcement focuses on a radical take on the LP Pledge, even as it provides a powerful anecdote (about a couple LPers in the Viper Militia in 1996) to support the reformist interpretation of the Pledge as a promise not to use violence to implement libertarianism:It was made clear at the convention in 1996 that it was this very reason in the early ‘70’s which prompted the creation of the pledge. But this experience has little to do with my concerns about the effort to eliminate the Pledge.Hancock continues:The sustained campaign to oppose statements that clearly set libertarians apart from the philosophies which support the “omnipotent state” must be clearly challenged. [...] Please email me with all of your questions and I will answer them all here in the open on this web site.That's a pretty bold promise. My first questions for Hancock (being emailed to him as this is written) are: - What specifically (if anything) about the leading reformer proposal for the LP Platform fails to clearly set libertarians apart from nanny staters? - Can you expand on your interpretation of, and commitment to, the LP Pledge by indicating which (if any) of the 30 elements of the No 1st Force Pledge you are unwilling to commit to? - For each element that you are unwilling to pledge to, can you briefly explain why that element is too radical for you?I look forward to Hancock's answers. -- Posted By Brian Holtz to Libertarian Intelligence at 12/22/2007 10:43:00 PM
[marketliberal] Questions for your LP Chair candidacy
Hi Ernest, Your LP Chair candidacy web pages says: Please email me with all of your questions and I will answer them all here in the open on this web site. I remember being impressed by your willingness in your 2006 race to print in your floor literature both sides of an email debate you had had regarding LP philosophy and strategy. My questions for you are: * What specifically (if anything) about the leading http://marketliberal.org/PlatComWiki/Greatest_Hits_Draft_Platform reformer proposal for the LP Platform fails to clearly set libertarians apart from nanny staters? * Can you expand on your interpretation of, and commitment to, the LP Pledge by indicating which (if any) of the 30 elements of the No http://knowinghumans.net/2007/10/no-1st-force-pledge-against-political.html 1st Force Pledge you are unwilling to commit to? * For each element that you are unwilling to pledge to, can you briefly explain why that element is too radical for you? I look forward to your answers. P.S. I've posted these questions on my blog http://LibertarianIntelligence.com/, where I will also highlight your answers when they appear on your site.
[marketliberal] RE: [LPplatform-discuss] Re: The Teflon Libertarian Moderate
Rob Power wrote: Rob) I reiterate that I don't at all see what Ron Paul has to do with the LP Platform (Rob Ron Paul's dining habits and dining companions indeed have zero to do with the LP Platform. Ron Paul's political positions, combined with the fact that overwhelming numbers of Libertarians of all ideologies fervently support him, have obviously lots to do with the LP Platform. I don't know how the latter point could be any more obvious.
[marketliberal] RE: [LPplatform-discuss] Re: The Teflon Libertarian Moderate
Kevin wrote: ) The MSM has got his range ( Or so the Lone Star Times (and you) hope. More info is at http://libertarianintelligence.com/
[marketliberal] RE: [LPplatform-discuss] Re: The Teflon Libertarian Moderate
Kevin Bjornson wrote: BH) It's true that the pre-Portland platform (revered by the 17 radical RP supporters I listed) ruled out almost every one of the 12 reformer positions I listed that Ron Paul supports (BH KB) With reformers like Ron Paul, we don't need reactionaries. (KB I didn't say Paul was an LP reformer.
